Culture
Rock on
by Denis Welch
Tom Stoppard now writes his plays by “stumbling off into the dark”. Some stumbling. Some dark.
The imaginative writers whose work endures best are not those who set out to say something about the state of the world, or the spirit of the age, or the nature of human relationships. They may wind up doing so, but that’s a by-product, not an aim. The best ones don’t even start out with ideas; as T S Eliot said of Henry James, “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Such writers, rather, follow an instinct, an interest, and simply record where it leads them, like detectives taking notes without necessarily wishing to solve the crime.
Tom Stoppard is one of them. No message has ever been delivered by one of his plays, but you come away from them as from a fireworks display, intoxicated by the swirl of ideas, emotions and associations – the feeling that you’ve been granted a glimpse of the very heart of life. You may be no wiser, but that’s not the point. The point is being there.
Is he, then, I ask, seeking confirmation of this theory when I finally get the great playwright on the phone, one of those writers who believe that what they write is not their business?
“I am much more that way inclined nowadays,” Stoppard replies. “When I was beginning, I felt I needed to know everything, but as I got older I realised it’s actually better not to know too much but let the thing discover itself. Now, the way I write, I think that stumbling off into the dark has got a lot to be said for it.”
Some stumbling. Some dark. With international successes like Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia already to his name, superlatives are being heaped on him for his latest play, Rock’n’Roll, which opens on Broadway in a few weeks’ time after a triumphant run in London.
We are unlikely ever to see The Coast of Utopia here, as it’s in three parts and requires 30 actors – “Very few theatres can afford to do it,” Stoppard admits – but Auckland’s Silo Theatre is currently doing a revival of perhaps his most personal play, The Real Thing, with Stephen Lovatt and Claire Chitham, and a major theatre is certain to pick up Rock’n’Roll before long.
It’s about an old Marxist academic visiting communist Czechoslovakia at the time of the 1968 uprising, and the music of Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, among others, features large. The play indeed draws on the real-life experience of a Czech pop group called Plastic People of the Universe, who, in Stoppard’s words, “came to irritate the regime sufficiently for the regime to come down on them”.
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia but left the country when he was two (his father was killed in the war and his mother later married a British army major called Kenneth Stoppard). He’s the complete Englishman now, knighted, just turned 70, married to actress Felicity Kendal, speaking in a slightly fruity drawl but immensely obliging and liable to schoolboy-like excitement over grammatical solecisms spotted in the media.
He once told an interviewer, “Every time I see who instead of whom in a newspaper it’s almost like a physical pain”; he has lost that fight, he reckons, but, when asked about other outrages, can’t resist fishing out a recent example – “It was actually funny it was so awful” – of a dangling participle. The news report (on kidnapped Austrian teenager Natascha Kampusch after her escape from captivity) went:
Although poised, possessed of a sure grasp of grammar, articulate and seemingly self-assured, the doctors knew this was a facade.
“And that was just last week!” exclaims Stoppard. “So the answer is yes, I’m still a pedant.”
His first job was as a journalist, actually, and there’s still a lot of the journalist in him: “I read a lot of newsprint – I’m really a bit of a newsprint junkie, I like to know what’s in the papers.” But he has abandoned the lifelong habit of tearing things out of the papers for later reference: “I’ve now got a large collection of things which I’ve torn out which I never seem to have time to get to.”
Perhaps because of that journalistic training he has rarely mined the material of his own life for his plays: making the main character in The Real Thing a playwright obessed with pop music is about as close as he’s come. And even with Rock’n’Roll he’s reluctant to acknowledge the personal connection.
“I have no idea why a particular subject suddenly becomes strong enough for me to get into writing a play,” he says. “It just finally got to be Czechoslovakia’s turn. But it’s not only about Czechoslovakia, it’s about a British communist and his family. So there’s a lot of different strands in the play.”
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