Stoppard, Tom
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (about twenty minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation, with some recognition errors)
Core ideas
The Real Thing: a play that doesn't date. Stoppard talks about the Broadway revival of The Real Thing (written in 1982, first New York production in 1984) with the same cast and director as in London. They chose not to update it; its true subject, "love and fidelity and marriage and friendship and betrayal", "surfs the years", and only a pop song (the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'") had to be replaced by the Walker Brothers because the rights were refused. He says he never treats his text as "set in marble" and changes plays in small ways in rehearsal.
Story first, language second. Stoppard says what gets him going is having a story to tell: the theatre is a storytelling art form, and he cannot write a word until he has characters doing something. He admits that his protagonist, a playwright, speaks for him in his attitude to words (the cricket-bat speech comparing well-made writing with clumsy political writing), but he is "not entirely at ease" with that moment and admires plays whose qualities are subtler and more economical. He agrees that rhetoric can become an end in itself and that, as he gets older, he is less interested in showing off and more in "corners and kinks" in a story.
Poetry, Housman, Russia, Chekhov. He muses on retirement as writing without owing anyone anything (even fourteen lines of verse over a year), calling poetry, where sound and sense collude, "a far greater achievement" than prose dialogue. The Invention of Love grew from discovering that the poet of A Shropshire Lad was also the greatest Latin scholar of his time: the interplay of the romantic and the classical (as in Arcadia) fascinates him. He describes the play on Russia he has been writing for years (1840-1870, the question of whether oppression stimulates art) and his admiration for Chekhov's efficiency after making an English version of The Seagull.
Excerpts
“« i think that it's a storytelling art form and having a story to tell is is really the only thing which gets me going »”
“« the true subject matter which is love and fidelity and marriage and friendship and betrayal all these things they um surf the years don't they »”
“« i find that these two sides of a man's character uh are very interesting and they play upon each other the romantic and the classical »”