I read Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia in Marrakesh airport, waiting for the
airline to find a lost pilot. It’s odd to read a drama about the
layers of meaning in the English landscape and to look up and see plane
fins, tarmac and palm trees. The text made me laugh out loud, which is rare,
and annoying. I have a professional pride in not laughing at other people’s
wit. A play is not supposed to be read for pleasure. The images and emotions
it incites aren’t the same as a novel’s; they create not a real world, but
an imaginary theatre that you cast with strange, hybridised actors. For
reasons known only to my id, my read-through of Arcadia was done by the cast
of The Good Life, the historian Andrew Roberts and a strange girl who I
think was a young Rita Tushingham.
Stoppard points out the dichotomy of a play: that it is the premonition of an
event that hasn’t happened. You’re writing the forecast, the predestination
of cause and effect. Many of Stoppard’s plays deal with the consequences of
time — play with it, stretch it, bend it. Arcadia traces parallel and
related events that happen in the same room, separated by almost 200 years.
A writer and an academic visiting a country house in 1989 unearth a mystery
about the tutor living in the house in 1809, a friend of Byron’s whose young
girl pupil is a mathematical genius. The two time frames crisscross; the
past is a constant presence.
I met the man who memorably said “The days of the digital watch are numbered”
outside the Duke of York’s theatre, in London, where previews of Arcadia
were just about to start. We walked up St Martin’s Lane to a restaurant: the
matinée audience of Calendar Girls was coming out, and we were surrounded by
excited gaggles of entranced women, all dressed up as members of the cast.
No play in London has actors and an audience that are such perfect mirror
images. You know that they’d whip their clothes off if you waved a pocket
diary at them.
Stoppard probably wouldn’t. He’s wearing tweed — a roomy, hairy jacket — and
woolly checked trousers. It makes him look like an academic. Perhaps a
country bookseller, up to browse Charing Cross Road, or maybe a spy, passing
himself off as an Englishman. These clothes are not careless or unconcerned
— no wardrobe lottery. Stoppard is the most observant of all playwrights; he
notices everything. It’s all relevant. He once said age is a high price to
pay for maturity: he’ll be 72 this year, but could easily pass as a
well-used man in his early fifties, with a handsome, lugubrious face. His
eyes patrol the room like an exam invigilator’s, from under a mass of meadow
hair that defies time, the follicles of the past still ardent for some
ruffling fingers.
Then there’s the voice, with that paprika touch of a mittel-European accent,
holding onto his Rs for slightly longer than is necessary, as if they tasted
minty. Stoppard left Zlin, in Czechoslovakia, before he was two, barely able
to talk. The family ran to Singapore, then to Darjeeling. His father died in
a Japanese internment camp; his mother remarried Major Stoppard, whose
tweedy name he took, and he came to England and public school. But he kept
that voice. Most children dumped in a new country at a new school in a new
tweed jacket do their best to conform. They’ll pick up a local accent in a
term. Stoppard, though, has nurtured and protected his otherness, his
refugee mouth.
He’s distracted by the play, the intensity of rehearsal. Why do playwrights
turn up for rehearsals? I don’t hang out in newsagents. And why do directors
want them? Aren’t they a bit like Hamlet’s father, a ghostly presence, the
reason for the drama, but not needed after the how-do-you-dos? He says he
loves the process, and he’s there to clarify things, to perhaps point out a
joke, suggest an emphasis. Only one director has ever asked him to stay
away. But what do you do if the actor completely misinterprets a character,
gets the wrong end of the shtick? You’ve written it imagining Richard
Burton, and you get Leslie Phillips. “Well, you have to be flexible,” Stoppard
says, “and know when to stand back.” There can be no orthodoxy in how to see
a play. Every audience gets something that is personal, and different.
Since Arcadia was first performed in 1993, concern about global warming and
ecology has not so much changed its meaning as added another dimension to
it: “Yes, it’s the elephant in the room.” Or perhaps in the
garden. “Great plays have to be able to change, to be revived for each generation,
with new understandings and interpretations. If a play can’t metamorphose,
it dies at the end of its run.” I ask if he’s noticed that Waiting for Godot
has now become a comedy. In my lifetime, it has gone from being a nihilistic
examination of the futility of life to being a surreal knockabout. “Maybe
it just seems funnier now; it may not be for the next generation.” He
remembers seeing it a couple of years after its first performance and
realising it was one of those moments, one of those plays, that changes the
idea of theatre, that opens up the possibilities of what a play could be.
“Chekhov did it,” he says. “Showed that drama can be about very little.
Godot changed plays, what narrative had to be. Harold [Pinter] did it. He
tore up the contract with the audience that said the actors would always
tell the truth. Before, if they said they’d like to have tea, it was because
they wanted tea. When Harold wrote it, the character might say he wanted tea
because the other bloke really wanted him to have coffee.” Stoppard asks the
waiter for white wine, “perhaps a burgundy. Maybe a chablis. No”, he says,
“no” — as if remembering a holiday cocktail, or a medical condition — “fizzy
water with ice and lemon”. I have a feeling he’d really like tea.
His play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is not unlike Waiting for Godot. “My son
Ed, who’s in Arcadia, said, ‘Dad, have you noticed this is very like Godot?’
I had noticed.” He has also written: “If an idea’s worth having once, it’s
worth having twice.” Arcadia has a lot of history in it. The lives of real people
flit between those of fictional characters. As with most of Stoppard’s
plays, this one involves a great deal of digging, an awful lot of reality.
Does he need the armature of events and people and history to hang his
clothes on? He says he loves doing the digging, loves looking it all up,
spends a lot of time in the London Library. Is it important that it’s right,
or does he just want a patina? “Oh, no, it’s really important that all the
details are absolutely correct. If there’s a physicist or botanist or
architect in the audience, I don’t want them to squirm and say, ‘Oh, no, he
got all that wrong.’ There’s a bit I’m quite pleased with in Rock’n’Roll.
It’s about journalism [Stoppard started as a journalist on the Western Daily
Press]. I have a man who asks a journalist if this thing is a story, and the
journalist replies that it’s not a story, but it is a piece. I’m pleased
with that. Journalists understand that.”
One of the important things that the factual content of his plays does is
allow the audience to feel clever. Like getting the answers of the
starters-for-10 ahead of the postgrad from Keele. I watched The Invention of
Love and caught allusions and references with all the joy of a boy fishing
for tadpoles, aware there was a sea of larger fish in the text sailing
majestically past that I never got close to, because I didn’t have a
classical education. Had he noticed that theatre was the only bit of
performing culture left where you’re allowed to be overtly intellectual?
Everywhere else, it’s thought to be too elitist to be smart. “Most people
who work in it would ardently deny they were intellectual or elitist,” he
says. Yes, but they’d probably deny it in French, quoting Brecht.
He’s not funny. You’re not funny, I point out, with admiration. You write
funny, but like this, face to face, you don’t even crack a smirk. “You don’t
think so?” No, definitely not. Not funny at all. “Perhaps I am, and you’re
just not getting it.” Which, annoyingly, is quite funny. The trouble with
interviewing Stoppard is that the professional rigour of question-and-answer
keeps skidding off the path into the fields of free-range conversation. I
just can’t help myself wanting to join in, with a terrible, uncontrollable
urge to be smart in front of the brilliant. And Stoppard is brilliant, but
without boasting or patronage, and with a great, self-deprecating humanity.
Does he mind being lumped into the club of the theatre of ideas, drama that
is about what you say, not what you do? “All politics ends up sooner or
later as morality, and that’s what I write about.” You always give the other
side, or, rather, both sides equal opportunity. “Yes. In Rock’n’Roll, the
old communist gets to make his arguments.”
This isn’t Shavian polemic, where the good guys get all the smart answers; or
David Hare, with its bullying propaganda from the left, a stage reduced to a
soapbox. Stoppard’s commitment to the freedoms of speech, thought and
democracy, and acting them out, extends right across the stage, and it’s
ultimately that which makes his plays surmount their content. Their concerns
and their humanity are what make them flexible and open to rediscovery and
re-evaluation. That, and the envy-inducing smartness of the writing, so polished
and sharp, so epigrammatic. He says the love and fascination of the language
could tempt him to run amok. Is the ardent lust for the English tongue
because it’s a second language? Is this one of these born-again things, the
devotion of a convert? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t examine why or how
I work.”
Is that perhaps because to look under the bonnet might upset the mechanism, or
might reveal something that’s just too banal? “Maybe,” Stoppard says. “When
people ask how I write, I want them to add, with a pen or a typewriter?
That’s the real question.”
Then time is up. He wants to see the actors before they go on. We walk down
the street. Outside the theatres, early girls wait for office dates. Not one
of them gives our greatest living playwright a second look. He is anonymous;
one of us. A diplomat once told me that the most perfect Englishmen are
almost inevitably Czech. I leave him at the stage door and, unbidden,
remember something he wrote in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Back home, I find
my copy: “We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a
kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere
else.”
Arcadia is at the Duke of York’s, WC2; see review, page 16
