Okay, I might not have my slides at the meeting. I have all of my information, minus a few exact references from the script that I have to write out, but I have a very solid amount of information typed up in a Word document to look at when I put my slides together. But if I don't get my slides done before the meeting, I can easily finish them afterwards when I get home and then email them to Tom. I figure so long as we figure out the order and everything, putting my slides in afterwards is as easy as copy and pasting. I'll try to get them done, but yeah, this weekend hasn't gone exactly as I had planned it. Kevin Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 20:30:56 -0400 Subject: [arcadia_group] Re: The game plan- READ From: tbarro1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To: arcadia_group@xxxxxxxxxxxxx hey guys i was thinking bring your slides on a thumbdrive or email it to yourself and when we get together on sunday we can put them together with all of us there.T On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 5:03 PM, R NOEMER <kevinnoemer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hey, sorry guys. I didn't get around to checking my email in the last two days. I was lucky enough to get mono from God knows where. Hooray! Anyways, I should have my slides done by Sunday. I've got a couple more articles to read through, but this is more or less the only work I have, so I'm not really too stressed about it. Also, Dan you seem to know a good deal about the math in the play, so if you have any thoughts you'd like to share with me, that'd be awesome. While I find all the iterations and naturalistic geometry interesting, math certainly is not my forte. I'll let you guys take a look at what I've come up with before we present in case anyone with a better grasp on the concepts has some thoughts. Kevin Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:48:34 -0400 Subject: [arcadia_group] Re: The game plan- READ From: dsince1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To: arcadia_group@xxxxxxxxxxxxx All; Dan here. Tom and Will - I am attaching a few documents I found most are either interviews or biographical content, and I am also including the Stage as Hyperspace paper and another dealing with the music titled Waltzing in Arcadia. Also, I have a little more work to do on my presentation slides, but will get those out soon. Thanks for meeting today, guys, I think things are going to be fine. Dan --Forwarded Message Attachment-- Back 1 article(s) will be saved. To continue, in Internet Explorer, select FILE then SAVE AS from your browser's toolbar above. Be sure to save as a plain text file (.txt) or a 'Web Page, HTML only' file (.html). In Netscape, select FILE then SAVE AS from your browser's toolbar above. EBSCO Publishing Citation Format: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.): NOTE: Review the instructions at http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=MLA and make any necessary corrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names, capitalization, and dates. Always consult your library resources for the exact formatting and punctuation guidelines. Works CitedZoglin, Richard. "Elitist, Moi?." Time 170.19 (05 Nov. 2007): 69-71. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Apr. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-tu.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ibh&AN=27257715&site=ehost-live>. <!--Additional Information: Persistent link to this record (Permalink): http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-tu.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ibh&AN=27257715&site=ehost-live End of citation--> Section: Art THEATER Elitist, Moi? Tom Stoppard isn't trying to be highbrow. To prove it, his new play is about rock music … and revolution When his interviewer arrives, Tom Stoppard is standing outside the Broadway theater where his latest play, Rock 'n' Roll, is about to begin previews. Sporting an open white shirt with the sleeves partly rolled up and tousled (if graying) hair that still gives him the look of an overage college student, he's enjoying a cigarette in a circle of warm spring sunshine that has managed to find a hole in the Manhattan skyline. But he really should be off his feet. A few days earlier, in the rush to catch a plane to New York City, Stoppard stubbed his toe hard in his London apartment. He has just come back from the doctor, who told him the toe is broken and ordered him to stay off it as much as possible--after which, Stoppard walked 13 blocks to the theater. The spectacle of Tom Stoppard hoofing it through the theater district on a bum foot would be disconcerting to people who think of the playwright as something of an élitist. Ever since his sensational stage debut in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--his absurdist riff on a pair of minor characters in Hamlet--Stoppard has become almost a genre unto himself, taking intellectual, often abstruse subject matter and turning it into challenging yet playful drama. His game, frequently, is the oddball juxtaposition: moral philosophy and gymnastics (Jumpers); Fermat's last theorem and Byron's love poetry (Arcadia); James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin (Travesties). "Tom said to me once that he decides on one play, and then shortly after decides on a different one," says Trevor Nunn, director of Rock 'n' Roll and several other Stoppard plays. "And then he lets them crash into each other." The Coast of Utopia, his nearly nine-hour trilogy about Russia's radical political thinkers of the 19th century, was a relatively straight-ahead historical journey (which is why this critic, at least, didn't rank it among his best), but it was an unexpectedly huge hit, playing to sold-out crowds during its run at New York City's Lincoln Center last season and winning seven Tony Awards, a record for a straight play. And that gives him the right to hobble into any Broadway theater with a play on just about any subject he wants. With Rock 'n' Roll, which took London by storm last year and opens on Broadway Nov. 4, Stoppard is exploring two more of his passions, one old and one relatively new. The play spans a couple of decades in the lives of a group of Czech political activists and British academics and shuttles back and forth between Cambridge and Prague in the years between the 1968 Soviet invasion and the "velvet revolution" of 1989. It's an exploration of political repression and commitment (with a typically Stoppardian digression into Sappho's poetry), but also a celebration of the rebel rock music that, in Stoppard's view, was as potent a force for revolution as Vaclav Havel's speeches. Scenes are punctuated with the sounds of groups like the Rolling Stones and the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech band imprisoned during the Soviet crackdown--with a special nod to Syd Barrett, a founding member of Pink Floyd, who was ousted by his band over his erratic, drug-fueled, near psychotic behavior. Rock 'n' Roll is the first stage work Stoppard has written explicitly about Czechoslovakia, where he was born in 1937 but which he left as a baby when his parents fled the Nazis, moving to Singapore and then India before landing in Bristol, England. Until the fall of communism, he returned only once to the country, in 1977. "I began to have more identity as a Czech comparatively recently," he says. "To tell you the truth, I think it was my mother dying about 10 years ago that gave me permission to be Czech. Because my mother's whole attitude was to leave the past behind. So I tended to kind of just respect her attitude." A pause. "That's not the whole truth. The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy." Those schoolboy days ended at age 17, when Stoppard went to work for a newspaper in Bristol. He covered the police beat and routine local news, but he also got to interview visiting celebrities--New Orleans jazz musicians, British movie-glamour queen Diana Dors. "I was so thrilled being a reporter," he says, "because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet." After a few years, he moved to London, where he continued to write reviews and celebrity profiles. In 1960 he talked his way into a trip to New York with a group of architects visiting the city's buildings and did a story for the Yorkshire Post on Lenny Bruce, whom he saw at the Village Vanguard and corralled outside for a 10-minute interview. Stoppard was taken by the irreverent comic (he even recalls some of his jokes, like Bruce's plea for world peace, urging all the nations of the world to get together and "kick the s___ out of the Polacks"). "His act was very scatological by English standards," he says. "But I was amazed by him." Stoppard's passion for rock music dates from his days in Bristol, where he would see most of the touring music acts that came to town--among them Frank Sinatra (who played the Bristol Hippodrome in the early '50s and didn't sell out), the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran, the rockabilly singer whose British tour ended when he was killed in a car crash in 1960. Like everyone else, Stoppard embraced the Beatles and Rolling Stones when they came along, but he admits to being a late bloomer when it came to Pink Floyd. "I ignored them completely at first," he says. "When Dark Side of the Moon came out, a friend of mine, a photographer, came over with the record and said, 'Please, listen to this. There's a play in this album.' I put it on top of this big wooden filing cabinet, and it stayed there for a year." The twice-divorced Stoppard, who turned 70 this year, is a grandfather now, but he keeps up with groups like Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys. "I listen to what shows up, really out of curiosity more than anything else," he says. "It's not often that something really gets to me." He goes to concerts only rarely--for the Stones when they tour and an occasional experiment like Oasis (a "brilliant songwriting band"). "I'm a very boring person," he insists. He doesn't go to movies, he says (though he writes plenty of them; see box), and spends most of his spare time reading--most recently Janet Malcolm's biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. His chief recreational passion is trout fishing, which he does four or five times a year, usually in Hampshire, England, but with periodic ventures to more exotic climes like New Mexico and Wyoming. Stoppard, who rolls his r's with a Continental flourish that somehow manages not to seem affected, bristles at the notion that his work is too highbrow or élitist for an ordinary audience--never mind that the New York Times felt the need to print a reading list for theatergoers who wanted to bone up before seeing The Coast of Utopia. He notes that his intellectual obsessions are hardly unique or rarefied. "The market for books about science and philosophy on the level on which I deal with things is a best-seller market," he says, pointing to authors like Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman. It tickles him when he gets good reviews for his scientific accuracy in specialist publications. Yet he insists his goal is not to lift the audience's brow but simply to explore fresh subjects that engage him. "I've got no interest in educating or instructing people. It's entirely about my getting interested in something because of its dramatic possibilities. I'm not there to do Op-Ed on Broadway." Indeed, Stoppard has always stood apart from many other British playwrights of his generation, like David Hare, for avoiding an overtly political (usually left-wing) point of view. He describes his politics as "timid libertarian." Yet he can rev up a pretty bold rant on Britain's "highly regulated society," which he thinks is "betraying the principle of parliamentary democracy." There was the garden party he threw recently, for example, where because there was a pond on the property, he was required to hire two lifeguards. "The whole notion that we're all responsible for ourselves and we don't actually have to have nannies busybodying all around us, that's all going now. And I don't even know in whose interest it's supposed to be or who wishes it to be so. It seems to be like a lava flow, which nobody ordered up. Of course, one does know in whose interest it is. It's in the interests of battalions of civil servants in jobs that never existed 10 years ago." Don't call Tom Stoppard a snob. But try finding a political rant in America as polished as that. PHOTO (COLOR): Radical band Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari in Rock 'n' Roll PHOTO (COLOR) ~~~~~~~~ By Richard Zoglin Script Doctor How Hollywood has used (or not used) Stoppard Film writing is "exciting and agreeable in the first half of the process," says Stoppard. "And then you get reminded that it's a movie and it's not yours." Screenplays He Wrote SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE "The playhouse is for dreamers," says the Bard (Joseph Fiennes) to Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Stoppard and Marc Norman's Oscar winner BRAZIL Stoppard added jokes to Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown's futuristic sci-fi script, which earned an Oscar nomination and cult status EMPIRE OF THE SUN Stoppard and Menno Meyjes streamlined J.G. Ballard's novel for Steven Spielberg and a 12-year-old Christian Bale Screenplays He Helped Rewrite SLEEPY HOLLOW Director Tim Burton tapped Stoppard to add humor to the more somber early draft of the Washington Irving story STAR WARS: EPISODE III--REVENGE OF THE SITH Stoppard played Jedi master with the dialogue on George Lucas' last Star Wars film; he did not, however, tamper with Yoda's syntax Drafts He Wrote THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM Director Paul Greengrass didn't end up using Stoppard's take on Matt Damon's taciturn spy HIS DARK MATERIALS: THE GOLDEN COMPASS His crack at the first film adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy novel was rejected in favor of a draft by director Chris Weitz PHOTO (COLOR) PHOTO (COLOR) Copyright © Time Inc., 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission. Back --Forwarded Message Attachment-- Back 1 article(s) will be saved. To continue, in Internet Explorer, select FILE then SAVE AS from your browser's toolbar above. Be sure to save as a plain text file (.txt) or a 'Web Page, HTML only' file (.html). In Netscape, select FILE then SAVE AS from your browser's toolbar above. EBSCO Publishing Citation Format: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.): NOTE: Review the instructions at http://support.ebsco.com/help/?int=ehost&lang=en&feature_id=MLA and make any necessary corrections before using. Pay special attention to personal names, capitalization, and dates. Always consult your library resources for the exact formatting and punctuation guidelines. Works CitedGussow, Mel. "Happiness, chaos and Tom Stoppard." American Theatre 12.10 (Dec. 1995): 22. International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 26 Apr. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-tu.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ibh&AN=9512142530&site=ehost-live>. <!--Additional Information: Persistent link to this record (Permalink): http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-tu.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ibh&AN=9512142530&site=ehost-live End of citation--> HAPPINESS, CHAOS AND TOM STOPPARD In Tom Stoppard's radio play, Where Are They Now?, the author's surrogate looks back nostalgically on his school days, and defines happiness as "a passing change of emphasis." A dozen years later, the protagonist of The Real Thing reiterates the statement with his observation, "Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight." For Stoppard, equilibrium had become a credo, as he repositioned himself to suit the shifts in the world. Call it a Stop-pardian sense of gravity. The playwright provides his own ballast, as he tries to remain in the moral center of his own universe. If one needs a symbol of Stoppard's own inner balance, consider the pronunciation of his name. It is STOP-PARD, with the syllables evenly accented. His life and his work are crowded with apparent contradictions. Although he was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (as Tomas Straussler) and spent his early years in Singapore and India, he has become one of the most English of Englishmen. He currently lives in both Chelsea, London and Iver, Bucks, where he is a country squire with an English garden, a lawn for cricket, a tennis court and his neighbor's cows peeping through the windows of his house. His idea of Arcadia, of an idyllic environment, is the English countryside. Yet he spends most of his time in cities, is frequently flying from one to another, and has a very cosmopolitan nature Stoppard is one of the wittiest and most literate writers of the English language, but he left school at an early age and found his education working on a provincial English newspaper. (Coincidentally, none of England's pre-eminent living playwrights--Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn and Stoppard went to university.) Although he has a gift for inventing epigrams, metaphors and circumlocutions, in his own reading he has great admiration for the understatement of Ernest Hemingway. Stoppard has no background in philosophy, philology, physics, metaphysics, mathematics or circus acrobatics, but his plays are filled with knowledgeable references to these and other specialized fields. In contrast to Pinter and Ayckbourn, he is untutored in the techniques of theatre, except for what he learned during his years as a drama critic and from working with and watching his directors. Yet his plays have a brilliant theatricality. He is, in fact, an exemplary autodidact, and a very quick study. In the plays, things are never quite what they seem to be. There are plays within plays, and in The Real Thing, a play outside the one we are watching. The image is that of an endless series of Chinese boxes or an exercise in recursion. Time plays tricks, as past and present coexist and sometimes brush against each other on the same stage. In many of his plays, there are echoes of his previous writings. The subject matter may shift from moral philosophy to quantum physics, but the voice is that of the author caught in the act of badinage, arguing himself in and out of a quandary. Most of his plays are inspired by a single central image (philosophy as gymnastics, a madman who thinks he has a symphony orchestra in his head). But, as the plays evolve, they become prisms, reflecting and refracting the author's ingenuity. Is Stoppard too clever by half, an intellectual rather than an emotional playwright? He confronts this and related questions during our conversations. When I talked to Stoppard in December 1994 in New York, he was on the brink of a very busy season. Hapgood, in its new version, was opening the following evening in Lincoln Center Theater's intimate Mitzi Newhouse Theater in a production starring Stockard Channing. That was to be followed several months later by Arcadia at Lincoln Center's large Vivian Beaumont Theater. Arcadia was a continuing success in London, and in February Indian Ink, his stage version of his radio play, In the Native State, was scheduled to open in the West End. Arcadia is one of his most ambitious and satisfying plays, a prismatic exploration of English history, horticulture, the chaos theory and the difference between the classical and romantic traditions. In the subtext are such issues as the pursuit of epiphany and the nature of genius. Along the way, people keep leaping to the wrong conclusions, which heightens the hilarity and the complexity. One of the many mysteries is who did what to whom in the game room or, rather, the game book, where Lord Byron, as a guest in this elegant country house, is recorded as having shot a hare. At the center of the play is an historian, Hannah Jarvis, but she is only one of a houseful of kaleidoscopic characters that emerge from the playwright's fervid imagination. In contrast to Arcadia, Hapgood had not been a critical success in its original production in London (in 1988). Since then, Stoppard had revised the play and clarified the plot. This devious comedy-mystery equates the wave-particle theory of light with the doubledealing world of espionage. The new version is 20 minutes shorter and clues the audience earlier that the spy named Ridley might have a double. In this Rubik's cube of a play, there are triple, perhaps even quadruple agents and a multiplidty of secret identities. After sudden shifts in his busy schedule, the peripatetic playwright was in a suite in a New York hotel, prepared for a long conversation. He lit the first of many cigarettes. His body was reasonably at rest, his mind restlessly in motion. MEL GUSSOW: You've said, "If there's a central idea in Hapgood, it is the proposition that in each of our characters is the working majority of a dual personality, part of which is always there in a submerged state." TOM STOPPARD: That was the hypothesis which generated the play itself--that the dual nature of light: works for people as .well: as things, and the one you meet in public is simply the working majority of that person. It's a conceit. It may have some truth to it. And the dual personality doesn't refer simply to counter-spies, but to Hapgood herself and others. It's not really dual personality. It's just that one chooses to "be" one part of oneself, and not another part of oneself. One has a public self and a submerged self. It's that sort of duality. Is one real, the other false? No, they're both part of the whole person. And it's something other than multiple personalities. It's not multiple personalities. It's a complex personality only part of which runs the show. Is that true in your life as well? Well, I wouldn't have the presumption to exempt myself [laughs] from this general rule. When you were a journalist, you operated both as a critic and as an interviewer, and you used different names. I did, only because it seemed a bit second-rate to write too many things on the same page. It wasn't that I was trying to conceal half of myself. But the thesis is really to do with people's temperaments. Their personal histories, like my personal history, is not central to the idea at all--the fact that I was born into one language, and grew up in another, and so on. That doesn't sound irrelevant by any means, but ifs not supposed to be a comment about that kind of life, about my kind of life. Do all your plays have an element of autobiography? I wonder. Perhaps it's something which it's impossible to escape, and one shouldn't protest against it, though I wouldn't have thought Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [Are Dead] had anything autobiographical in it. I'm not really the right kind of writer to oblige such a speculation because the area in which I feed off myself is really much more to do with thoughts I have had rather than days I have lived. A number of misconceptions have sprung up about you and your work, that your plays are divorced from your own life; also that you're very intellectual and unemotional. One certainly doesn't feel that in the scene in which Hapgood is so moved that she cries. That particular duality has become a bit of a cliche about me. It's rather a high-tech production of Hapgood, so it does encourage that view of the work. But there is a heart there. I don't think you would bother to write about it if it was about robots. It's only interesting because they're human beings. In searching for the arc of your career, I made a list of the principal subjects in the plays: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, theatre-philosophy; The Real Inspector Hound, theatre-journalism; Traveslies, lit-phil; Jumpers, phil-gym; Dirty Linen, pol-sex; Night and Day, journ-pol; Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, music-pol; Cahoot's Macbeth, theatre-pol; The Real Thing, theatre-love; Hapgood, sci-spy; Arcadia, lit-math-hortarch; Indian Ink, lit-art-pol-soc. It seems that the plays are becoming more inclusive or expansive. And yet Indian Ink is actually a very intimate play. It's a play of intimate scenes. There's something working against the notion that the plays are expanding in them horizons. There is a lot of lit in the plays and a lot of phil, which I think is a fair comment on what I'm made up of. A lot of lit and phil and more and more sci and phys. I've got a funny feeling the sci and phys are a phase, like delinquency, which one goes through. It's lasted two plays. Exactly, it's two plays. Two suggests purpose, misleadingly. One is singular, two is a coincidence, three is a trend. In the case of those two plays, they began because I stubbed my toe against two pieces of information or two areas of science which I found really interested me. It didn't seem to be a release of some scientist within me. On the contrary, it seemed to be going against what really interests me, what I choose to read, and so on. I thought that quantum mechanics and chaos mathematics suggested themselves as quite interesting and powerful metaphors for human behavior--not just behavior, but about the way, in the latter case, in which it suggested a determined life, a life ruled by determinism, and a life which is subject simply to random causes and effects. Those two ideas about life were not irreconcilable. Chaos mathematics is precisely to do with the unpredictability of determinism. Hifalutin' words, but it's actually a very fascinating door, a view through a cracked-open door. Pinning myself down to your question: I have no sense of looking for a third such fascinating scientific metaphor, and I have no reason to suppose that I'll stub my toe on a third one. How did you stub your toe against those two? Casually. Books in an airport? I joke like that, but it's not one book on one day. My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that. Rather in the same way as a year ago or more, a fairly quiescent interest in or sympathy towards Roman poetry and literature of antiquity suddenly had its turn. I think it turned into something more obsessive through reading about A. E. Housman, again somebody whom I had read for years on and off. That was another quiescent interest. Do you read Latin? I can't say I read Latin. I studied Latin up to what we call in England A level. So it's not gibberish to me. But I read it with cribs. What I enjoy is reading a particular poem or a poet in numerous translations, to see how different translators try to find the original. There's a play to be written about translation, I think. For your own translations, do you always work from a literal version? Yes. I've done two Schnitzlers, a Nestroy and a Molnar, and I worked on a Lorca. It doesn't feel like much over 30 years. Years and years ago, one of my resolutions--now a failed resolution was to learn a language well enough, Russian by choice, not simply for purposes of translation but so that I could read things the way they were meant to be understood. And what have you done about that? Nothing. I postponed reading War and Peace until I could read Russian. The result is now I cannot read Russian and I have not read War and Peace. Perhaps you need a long sabbatical. I don't know about these sabbaticals. My ambition is to retire, and has been for ages. When I say retire I mean just pladdly writing at my own speed without owing anything to anybody, without anybody waiting for what I'm writing. I never seem to manage to do that. I think it's a temperamental defect. That's pretty clear by now. To return to Arcadia, where did it begin? With James Gleick's book, Chaos? I think so. At the same time, I was thinking about Classicism and Romanticism as opposites in style, taste, temperament, art. I remember talking to a friend of mine, looking at his bookshelves, saying there's a play, isn't there, about the way that retrospectively one looks at poetry, painting, gardening, and speaks of classical periods and the romantic revolution, and so on. Particularly when one starts dividing people up into classical temperaments and romantic temperaments--and I suppose it's not that far from Hapgood in a way. The romantic temperament has a classical person wildly signalling, and vice versa. You and I tend to talk about all this as if it really works like that, as if there's this acorn that you find somewhere and put manure around, and water, and hope it grows into some kind of sapling, and so on and so forth. It doesn't seem to me to be that kind of orderly natural development. No single acorn? It's more than that. I have the feeling that you throw the acorn away at some point. You encourage me to talk about a book or a thought which generates everything that follows. It's true in a limited sense, but an alternative way of making a picture of the process would be to say that it's something that starts you up, like a motor gets started up, like a cranking handle. Then you throw the handle away, and drive off down the road somewhere and see where the road goes. What's an acorn that you've discarded? When it comes to it, I don't think Arcadia says very much about these two sides of the human personality or temperament. I don't think it's in the play. It's by no means in the foreground. And yet, it's firing all around the target, making a pattern around the target. Where does the texture start? Suddenly horticulture enters, and then Lord Byron. You didn't set out to write a play about horticulture and Byron? No, I didn't, but I had read one or two books about Byron over the years, and I was reading them with a faint sense of undisclosed purpose. [ suppose if you're my kind of writer you're always working. One's leisure reading is subconsciously purposeful. You still write in longhand and then dictate it into a tape recorder? Yes. I do exactly that with new work, but when I'm rewriting or changing things, I now prefer to give my secretary lots and lots of pages with longhand and squiggles, "insert here." I love working on a typescript. I love the power of the blue pencil. "This is rubbish, take it out. Put this in. Turn it around." Is it a canard that you're a conservative? Would it be one? I always thought of myself as a conservative, not in a sort of ideological way. I'm really a bit of a failure talking about politics because I never get into the subject or issues in the manner in which a responsible citizen really ought to. I respond in some other way aesthetically even, certainly emotionally. Emotionally I like to conserve. I don't like impulsive change. But what I like and don't like certainly doesn't divide up into things that the Conservative Party or the Labor Party does. I was very pleased with Mrs. Thatcher at the beginning. I thought of her as being a subversive influence, which I found very welcome. The Wilson-Callaghan pre-Thatcher years in English politics I thought were nauseating. I thought politicians had become people one didn't bother to listen to because they seemed desperately anxious not to expose their flanks to any side. There were very few unqualified statements of intent. I loved the way she came in. I was very personally interested in the whole saga of print unions, for example, a huge corrupt scandal which government after government wouldn't tackle. Which brings us to [Rupert] Murdoch as well. I think he's a very had influence on English, or indeed global, cultural life. Ten years ago, he was a sort of hero for me, for sending the printers packing. The printers were making newspapers into an impossible economic proposition, and I love newspapers. I was excited when Murdoch came in his Australian underhanded way with a lot of money behind him and just destroyed them. It was well overdue. You've been so strong on human rights. What about human rights for printers? I don't think you have a human right to cheat and steal. There were printers signing on as Mickey Mouse. I just think they pushed their luck. Murdoch said, it's not a union, it's a protection racket. I think that was probably quite fair. But then you turned against Murdoch. That's part of a shift of feeling about the press as a whole. Night and Day contains statements which are still flourished. I read one last week by people who want to leave the press completely untrammelled. I don't know what I want now. I've arrived at a kind of defensive position, which is not entirely where I stand intellectually. I've decided that getting cross about the press is like getting cross about the Flat Earth Society. It's become an awful joke. What I find upsetting about the notorious end of the British press is what it says about the readership. I think the tabloid press treat their readers almost as if they are morons. And it's awful the way the readers don't seem to mind. You've said, "Journalism is the last line of defense in this country." I think that's still true. I think people would be getting away with much more, were it not for newspapers blowing the whistle, or just being there to observe. Could you imagine having stayed in journalism and not being a playwright? No. Looking at it now, I would think of that as an unhappy outcome, not because I love the theatre, in quotes, but because it was wonderful to work for myself and not have to be accountable to somebody. I have a formulation about the luck we've had, which is that people like myself appear to have promoted a recreation into a career. We're getting away with it, and it's the getting away with it part which I don't want to lose. It seems quite capricious, the way one profession is rewarded over another one. There's an evolution in every kind of society, particularly now in what we call the free-market society, where certain pursuits are amazingly over-rewarded. Being a popular singer, or in a band. There's no logic in it. For you, having chosen playwriting, it's a kind of super freelance. You're not beholden to anyone. No. I'm one of the people who fall into the over-rewarded category, I suppose. I don't coast on it. I work harder than I used to when I was a reporter. But it feels different. I do it for myself. You've talked about writing a play about your growing up in India. Is Indian Ink the play? No. I had talked about writing about the ethos of empire, and I suppose that's a very good example of what we were speaking about earlier: the acorn hasn't been thrown away. But it's not really just that. It's much more an intimate play than a polemical play. One kids oneself along that every little shred of reference to the larger subject resonates through the whole piece, and enlarges the play. That's just a kind of sweet thought by the playwright. Does it surprise you that you've dealt with so many different subjects? No. I'm a bit of a gadfly. Different things catch my interest for a while, and I have a hot flush about it, and something else catches my interest. Of course, a gadfly is not the ultimate compliment. It borders on the dilettante. Precisely. What we're leaving out: The cake is upside down. Theatre is a popular art form, it's part of the world of relief and release, of entertainment. That's what it's for. The other bit of the cake which is to do with formulating and promulgating and examining and revealing issues, life that's a program that can be continued through other means: journalism, television, essays. There's a case for the view that if you've chosen to work for the theatre, your fundamental objective is to be part of an art form that diverts, entertains and instructs rather than that you're engaged in teaching your fellow citizens certain lessons. You said that if you wanted to change the world, the last thing you would do is write a play. What I really meant was that if there is a local concrete problem which you want to change, yes. I said that, but I'm not sure that it's entirely watertight. Maybe the way to continue our conversation about newspapers would be to write a play. Is plot still difficult for you? Can't you tell? [Laughs.] With Arcadia I got lucky. I didn't know it would work out like that. Like most writers like most people-- if I could live a slightly different kind of life, it would make an enormous amount of difference to how much I wrote, and the quality of what I wrote. Occasionally you get into a period where mentally you're living with this play, nothing is interrupting you, and all the possibilities the neurons or nerve ends you're aware of them all and, consciously or subconsciously, you make the best possible use of them. If you have enough solitude and concentration, you can make the best of the opportunity. But a lot of the time I'm writing in a kind of harassed, interrupted way. I came to the conclusion the other day that the information is being fed in the wrong order in the second act of Indian Ink. I came back from Hapgood and looked at it for an hour and a half before I fell asleep. It's all done in the space of an hour here, an hour there. That's not how to do these things. You might say from the evidence that you thrive on that process. Well, no. With Arcadia, I had a really good period of time, where somehow I could keep it all in view and look further down the road and see where things were heading, and manipulate the material so I could intersect properly. The more I got into it, the more I realized that this was going to work as a piece of storytelling. Hapgood was a kind of struggle from the word go, and I was still dealing with it at Lincoln Center, trying to explain, simplify. We started off by referring to it as a melodrama. The way you label something is very helpful; it gets you out of the corner. Once I began to think of Hapgood as a melodrama, I felt much more comfortable with it, because it is melodramatic. It's not satiric about the spy business. It operates on a heightened, slightly implausible level of life. It's probably the only play I've written, as far as I can remember offhand, in which somebody shoots somebody else on stage. It has to work on that level for the audience to accept it. It absolutely does. The thing about melodrama is that if the audience makes the right decision about it, they accept everything. If they make the wrong decision about it early on, then the drama actually becomes silly. How would you categorize Arcadia? Because I was happy with it anyway, I didn't need to label it. I didn't need to get myself off the hook. Some people think it's your best play. I know they do. I think that's what they're talking about: the story works best. But you know some of your plays are better than others. Of course. And in spite of defects I'm aware of and would like to correct on all of them, I also think that some of them actually are good, better than good sometimes. I'm now contradicting myself. If I have to talk about them at all, which I never volunteer to do, I'd rather use a phrase like "madcap comedy," to dissemble. In a much simpler sense, there's a modest person hiding a proud person, I suppose. I never thought I would manage to write a play at all. It was something I wanted to do, but I was astonished when I managed to do it. Just seemed to be something that would be too difficult for me to do when I was starting out. You used to say, and I never entirely believed it, that all your characters sounded like you. I used to say it because I used to think it was true, and maybe it was true in those days. i think everybody in Night and Day, sounds like me, for example. It's less true now. This was literally true of Night and Day in one isolated case: I took a speech away from one character and gave it to another, and it made no difference. I just needed somebody to say something at that point. In that sense, they were all speaking with my voice. In a limited way, you might say that they were interchangeable. So I meant it when I said it, but I wouldn't say it nowadays. It's not true of Arcadia, and it's not true of Indian Ink. No, it's not. Years ago, at the time of The Real Thing, Mike Nichols said you were one of the few happy people he knew. When I mentioned that to you, you were offended by the word happy, you said that you were as unhappy as the next man. Boasting about my unhappiness! Are you a happy man? Yes. I'm just looking at the word happy for a moment. Mike was always tremendously pleased by the definition of happiness in that play. "Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight." Attaining your happiness, if you're talking about me, is learning that lesson. You try not to stand in the way of the onrushing train, to change the metaphor. But in fact I suppose what you're remembering is that happiness seems to imply a turning away from whatever might compromise your happiness. One is exposed naked in the winds of the world, and everybody around you has got problems. Some are acute, some are less serious than others. You live in the little world of your family and the larger world of your colleagues and the huge world of newspaper and television news. So happiness is not really a very adequate word. When I said I felt blessed by good fortune, that's generally the truth. Clearly your life and everyone's life is full of things that make you unhappy from time to time. You just deal with them. That reminds me again of the boy in your play, Where Are They Now? That indeed is the play where that character says happiness is a passing shift of emphasis. I do have an idyllic vision of life. Whether one has a right to live it is another matter. It's to do with self-reliance. It's cultivating your garden without being pulled, without having one's sleeve tugged by what's happening outside the wall. PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Tom Stoppard PHOTOS (BLACK & WHITE): Classical or romantic? You be the judge in Stoppard's Arcadia, seen here in two productions directed by Trevor Nunn. At right, Felicity Kendal and Samuel West appeared at Britain's National Theatre. Below, Billy Crudup and Jennifer Dundas at New York's Lincoln Center Theater. PHOTOS (BLACK & WHITE): "Hapgood is not satiric about the spy businesszz It operates on a heightened, slightly implausible level of life." Above, Jo Ann Carney, Dan LaMorte and Gus Bustinice, left to right, in a production directed by Mary Zimmerman at Chicago's Center Theatre Ensemble. Below, David Lansbury and Stockard Channing in Jack O'Brien's Lincoln Center Theater staging. PHOTOS (BLACK & WHITE): "I'm a bit of a gadfly." Above, a scene from Rosencranz and Gaildenstern Are Dead, in a production at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival; which featured, from left, Davis Hall, Bub Ari, Eric Tavaris, Eduardo Patino and John Nichols. Above right, Michael Gross and Linda Purl in The Real Thing at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood. Below right, lsiah Whitlock Jr. and DeAnn Meats in Night and Day at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. ~~~~~~~~ AN INTERVIEW BY MEL GUSSOW Mel Gussow, who writes about theatre for the New York Times, is the author of Conversations with Pinter and Conversations with Stoppard (both Limelight Editions). This article is excerpted by permission from the latter, which was published last month. Copyright of American Theatre is the property of Theatre Communications Group and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Back Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. Check it out. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! 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