Issue 109, Winter 1988
At the time of this interview, Stoppard was near the end of rehearsals for his new play, Hapgood, which opened in London in March, 1988. For the duration of the rehearsals Stoppard had rented a furnished apartment in central London in order to avoid commuting, and although he had said, “I would never volunteer to talk about my work and myself more than ninety seconds,” he was extremely generous with his time and attention. Stoppard is tall and exotically handsome, and he speaks with a very slight lisp.
INTERVIEWER
How are the rehearsals going?
TOM STOPPARD
So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.
INTERVIEWER
What provokes the changes? Does the transfer from your imagination to the stage alter your perception? Or do the director and the actors make suggestions?
STOPPARD
They make a few suggestions, which I am often happy to act upon. In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s filmscripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial. Peter Wood, the director with whom I’ve worked for sixteen years, sometimes feels obliged to find a humanity, perhaps a romantic ambiguity, in scenes that are not written like that but that, I hope, contain the possibility. I like surface gloss, but it’s all too easy to get that right for the first night only to find that that was the best performance of the play; from then on the gloss starts cracking apart. The ideal is to make the groundwork so deep and solid that the actors are continually discovering new possibilities under the surface, so that the best performance turns out to be the last one. In my plays there are usually a few lines which Peter loathes, for their slickness or coldness, and we have a lot of fairly enjoyable squabbles that entail some messing about with the text as we rehearse. In the case of Hapgood there is a further problem that has to do with the narrative mechanics, because it’s a plotty play, and I can’t do plots and have no interest in plots.
INTERVIEWER
Yet you have produced some complex and plausible plots. So why the aversion?
STOPPARD
The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract. I get interested by a notion of some kind and see that it has dramatic possibilities. Gradually I see how a pure idea can be married with a dramatic event. But it is still not a play until you invent a plausible narrative. Sometimes this is not too hard—The Real Thing was fairly straightforward. For Hapgood the thing that I wanted to write about seemed to suit the form of an espionage thriller. It’s not the sort of thing I read or write.
INTERVIEWER
What was the original idea that made you think of an espionage thriller?
STOPPARD
It had to do with mathematics. I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties—axioms—that led to others. But then, in a sense, it all started going wrong, with concepts like non-euclidean geometry—I mean, looking at it from Euclid’s point of view. The mathematics of physics turned out to be grounded on uncertainties, on probability and chance. And if you’re me, you think—there’s a play in that. Finding an idea for a play is like picking up a shell on a beach. I started reading about mathematics without finding what I was looking for. In the end I realized that what I was after was something that any first-year physics student is familiar with, namely quantum mechanics. So I started reading about that.
INTERVIEWER
It is said that you research your plays thoroughly.
STOPPARD
I don’t think of it as research. I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop. I didn’t research quantum mechanics but I was fascinated by the mystery that lies in the foundation of the observable world, of which the most familiar example is the wave/particle duality of light. I thought it was a good metaphor for human personality. The language of espionage lends itself to this duality—think of the double agent.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to think the success of the play has so much to do with its production. Do you, therefore, get involved with the lighting, costumes, etcetera? Please give examples, anecdotes.
STOPPARD
It is obvious that a given text (think of any classic) can give rise to a satisfying event or an unsatisfying one. These are the only relative values that end up mattering in the theater. A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors. When the writing is over, the event is the thing. I attend the first rehearsal of a new play and every rehearsal after that, as well as discussions with designers, lighting designers, costume designers . . . I like to be there, even though I’m doing more listening than talking. When Hapgood was being designed, I kept insisting that the shower in the first scene wouldn’t work unless it was in the middle of the upper stage, so that Hapgood could approach us facing down the middle. Peter and Carl insisted that the scene wouldn’t work unless the main entrance doors were facing the audience. They were quite right, but so was I. We opened out of town with the shower in the wings, and it didn’t work at all, so we ended up having to find a way to have both the doors and the shower in view of the audience. The look of the thing is one thing. The sound of it is more important. David Lean was quoted as saying somewhere that the hardest part of making films is knowing how fast or slow to make the actors speak. I suddenly saw how horribly difficult that made it to make a film. Because you can’t change your mind. When you write a play, it makes a certain kind of noise in your head, and for me rehearsals are largely a process of trying to reproduce that noise. It is not always wise to reproduce it in every instance, but that’s another question. The first time I met Laurence Olivier, we were casting Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He asked me about the Player. I said the Player should be a sneaky, snakelike sort of person. Olivier looked dubious. The part was given, thank God—or Olivier—to Graham Crowden who is about six-foot-four and roars like a lion. Olivier came to rehearsal one day. He watched for about fifteen minutes, and then, leaving, made one suggestion. I forget what it was. At the door he turned again, twinkled at us all, and said, “Just the odd pearl,” and left.
INTERVIEWER
Is it a very anxious moment for you, working up to the first night?
STOPPARD
Yes. You are trying to imagine the effect on people who know nothing about what is going on and whom you are taking through the story. In a normal spy thriller you contrive to delude the reader until all is revealed in the denouement. This is the exact opposite of a scientific paper in which the denouement—the discovery—is announced at the beginning. Hapgood to some extent follows this latter procedure. It is not a whodunit because we are told who has done it near the beginning of the first act, so the story becomes how he did it.
INTERVIEWER
Did you draw on some famous spies, like Philby or Blunt, for your characters?
STOPPARD
Not at all. I wasn’t really interested in authenticity. John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy uses the word joe for an agent who is being run by somebody, and I picked it up. I have no idea whether it is authentic or invented by Le Carré.
INTERVIEWER
What happens on the first night? Do you sit among the audience or in a concealed place at the back? And what do you do afterwards?
STOPPARD
The first audience is more interesting than the first night. We now have previews, which makes a difference. Actually, my play The Real Inspector Hound was the first to have previews in London, in 1968. Previews are essential. The idea of going straight from a dress rehearsal to a first night is frightening. It happened with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and we got away with it, but for Jumpers we had several previews by the end of which I had taken fifteen minutes out of the play. I hate first nights. I attend out of courtesy for the actors and afterwards we all have a drink and go home.
INTERVIEWER
How does the London theater world differ from New York?
STOPPARD
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you’re lucky if the sound of a police car doesn’t rip the envelope twice a night. This difference means something, I’m not quite sure what. Well, as Peter Brook will tell you, the theater has its roots in something holy, and perhaps we in London are still a little holier than thou. The potential rewards of theater in New York are really too great for its own good. One bull’s-eye and you’re rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get richer. You’re the talk of the town. The taxi drivers have read about you and they remember you for a fortnight. You get to be photographed for Vogue with new clothes and Vuitton luggage, if that’s your bag. If it’s a new play, everyone owes the writer, they celebrate him—the theater owners, the producers, the actors. Even the stage doorman is somehow touched by the wand. The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment. The British are more phlegmatic about these things. You know about British phlegm. The audiences, respectively, are included in this. In New York, expressions of appreciation have succumbed to galloping inflation—in London only the Americans stand up to applaud the actors, and only American audiences emit those high-pitched barks that signify the highest form of approval. But if you mean the difference between what happens on stage in London and New York, there isn’t much, and there’s no difference between the best. Cross-fertilization has evened out what I believe used to be quite a sharp difference between styles of American and British acting, although it is probably still a little harder to find American actors with an easy command of rhetoric, and British actors who can produce that controlled untidiness that, when we encountered it a generation ago, seemed to make acting lifelike for the first time.