As Jumpers returns to the West End, the playwright Tom Stoppard happily tells our critic Benedict Nightingale that he's right out of ideas:
THERE’S ONE CLOUD in Tom Stoppard’s sky, and, no, it’s not exactly that he’s suffering from writer’s block. As he reminds me in his genially punctilious way, that would mean he had a play in mind which he was finding impossible to write. But 18 months after the three parts of The Coast of Utopia opened at the National, the problem is a lack of ideas and the feeling that, at 66, time is limited: “I go to bed every night saying please God give me a play, and so far he hasn’t.”
Not that he’s complaining too ferociously, for otherwise his sky is sunny and, as he says, his life is “blessed”. His actor son Ed, who made a strong impression at this year’s Chichester Festival, has just presented him with a grandchild. He’s finished the first of what may eventually be three film scripts of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, as well as a version of Pirandello’s Henry IV for the Donmar. And, as we spoke, Simon Russell Beale and Essie Davis were next door, rehearsing the revival of Sir Tom’s Jumpers that is about to transfer from the National to the West End.
That would have astonished Stoppard back in 1972, when Diana Rigg and Michael Hordern gave the play its premiere, also a National production, at the Old Vic. Kenneth Tynan, the theatre’s dramaturg, had invited Stoppard to his flat to read the script to its directors, Laurence Olivier prime among them. As he stumbled along, he realised he was a very bad reader.
“It was awful, awful. At the end there was a long silence, and Olivier, who had been lying back on the sofa, asleep or awake I don’t know, opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling and said: ‘Ken, where did you get those lights?’ ”
Given the play’s mix of parody, farce and deeply serious ideas, plus Olivier’s intellectual inadequacies, that reaction wasn’t surprising; but Stoppard needed all Tynan’s reassurances to recover his faith in a play that was supposed to show that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead hadn’t been a one-off success.
Jumpers had already proved tough to write. Indeed, Stoppard had belatedly realised that what he’d intended as the first act was as long as an entire play should be. He had reduced the second act, in which the moral philosopher George Moore was to deliver the paper he’d been preparing, to a nightmarish coda. And all he recalls of the rehearsals is hurry, fluster, feverish rewrites and radical cuts that continued far into the previews.
“In no sense was there a feeling that this was a play that might be treated as a modern classic,” says Stoppard. “It was much more a case of what the f*** are we going to do now?”
But critics and audiences relished the exuberant fun and the metaphysical inquiry. At the time Stoppard said that the play’s subject was whether “social morality is a conditioned response to history and environment or whether moral sanctions obey an absolute, intuitive, God-given law”. And that’s still his view of a play he’s still willing to call “theist”.
Sir Tom doesn’t belong to what Sir Archie Jumpers, the cynical vice-chancellor of the university where the play occurs, calls God’s “glorified supporter’s clubs”, but his sympathies remain with Archie’s ideological foe, the bumbling believer, Moore. “He says ‘There’s more in me than meets the microscope’ and one has to say, well, if there is, what is that? You end up with some unformulatable formulation which could be labelled God.
“Myself, I’m deeply sceptical of materialism. I do not buy what at the moment is the sense of what a human being is. I don’t buy the idea that our thoughts, emotions and aesthetic and moral values are all traceable to electric events in the neurozones in our skulls.”
The questions Jumpers raises about good and evil, nature and nurture, still seem to Stoppard as “askable and unanswerable as they were in 1972”. But there’s another aspect of the play that’s less universal but maybe more topical than it was then. Sir Archie’s party, the Rad-Libs, has come to power, and it’s turning out to be an arrogant outfit which suppresses dissent and blithely makes its agricultural spokesman Archbishop of Canterbury. Aren ’t there contemporary parallels? Stoppard cautiously agrees. He feels we’re more regulated and controlled than ever: “It’s as if the population is bifurcating into two camps, one of which tells the other what it can and can’t do.”
Indeed, he goes further, declaring that Jumpers is about the phenomenon of spin before that overworked word entered the lexicon. Maybe the politicians of yore were just as manipulative, but their methods were different and certainly less dependent on market research. There was less evidence of the moral and political pragmatism that the play is attacking. “We seem to have moved from a period when someone would say, ‘I’m a socialist: if you want that, vote for me, and if you don’t want it, don’t vote for me.’ Now it’s much more, ‘I’m going to find out what you will vote for and call it socialism.’”
Right now, Stoppard is waiting to hear who will direct his screenplay of Pullman’s Dark Materials, a trilogy he likes for its “tremendously inventive imagination” but has found tough to adapt, because “Philip is making it up as he goes along and it’s quite hard to follow the logical structure”.
His stage version of Henry IV should be seen next year, which is a feat in itself, because Stoppard agreed to adapt it because he recalled Richard Harris once giving a brilliant performance in the title role — and only afterwards re-read Pirandello’s play and realised he admired that too.
His sole remaining project is to translate a comedy by a still-unnamed French author and maybe direct it himself in the West End. That would, he says wryly, be “another way of not writing a play myself”.
And that brings Stoppard back to what he admits is a worry. After Arcadia in 1993 it took him four years of research on Housman, Latin scholarship and Victoriana to write The Invention of Love, and then another four years investigating 19th-century Russian history to produce The Coast of Utopia. “I’d like to speed the process up. I mean, in four years’ time I’ll be 70, and I ask myself, how many plays can I write? And if it’s one every four years, the answer is not many.”
Half-jokingly, I suggest we ask Times readers to send in their proposals for a new Stoppard piece, but, no, that wouldn’t work. It’s true that when Lee Hall recently told him he had three ideas for a play, Sir Tom replied “You can spare me one”, but he too was joking. Ideas don’t merely have to be his own. In the past they’ve been unpredictable, unconnected with what he’s done before.
“You can’t really explain. It’s like winning the lottery, getting it right, a one in 14 million chance.” The last thing he needs is an idea that demands long research. Rather, he wants a “potent situation” which will develop and grow almost of its own accord. That’s the way it has been with many of his plays, such as The Real Inspector Hound, which began with the discovery of a body whose identity he didn’t initially know, the victim of a murderer he couldn’t identify either. The process was much the same with Jumpers — a piece he’d like to emulate for another reason too.
Along with Travesties, it’s the prime example of what he once called the Theatre of Audacity: “There’s so much going on, different kinds of art are thrown together with violence. I was always attracted to the kind of theatre that turns your head around, and I thought, yes, be audacious. Bring on the Moon, bring in music. Have a pyramid of gymnasts and a gunshot and a dead body. And at the same time make people listen to three pages of somebody trying to find his way through the philosophical thickets.
“I’d like to write something that’s equally free and chaotic and fun. But I’m not in a position to choose, am I? At the moment I’d be grateful for two men and a dog in a basement.”
Jumpers previews from November 14-19 and opens on November 20 at the Piccadilly, Denman Street, W1 (0870 060 6630). During the preview season, the Travelex “£10 seat season” continues
Quotable Stoppard
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” Jumpers
“The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.” Night and Day
“I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.” Ibid.
“I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory — they’re all blood, you see.“ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?” Ibid.
“The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” Ibid.
“Life is a gamble with terrible odds — if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.” Ibid.
“We would never love anyone if we could see past our invention.” The Invention of Love
[The Times, 08/11/03]
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