The world’s most widely recognized and respected living English playwright is concerned about the fate of a Sinhala school play. Playlet, actually – a skit that was stopped even before it could start. The production was to take place in a school not far from where the playwright is relaxing, sipping Ceylon tea. “What happened? Do you know anything?” he asks.
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| The Sunday Times was the official print media sponsor of the HSBC GLF (Jan 18-22) |
Tom Stoppard, author of the legendary 1966 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Is Dead and a slew of stage, radio and screenplays, is taking a late afternoon break during the Galle Literary Festival. He has found a quiet spot on a back verandah at the Amangalla Hotel, inside the Galle Fort.
He has just come in from a book-signing on the other side of the street, down in the garden of the Hall de Galle, following a one-hour session indoors talking to a full house about his work. He is dressed in a loose light white cotton shirt and cream-coloured slacks, and looks none the worse for the heat, the humidity and the general festival crush.
“I was reading about it [the aborted school play] in the Daily Mirror,” continued Sir Tom. He was referring to a provincial news item earlier that week about a school play being quashed for attempting to poke fun at persons in high places, and the school principal was interdicted as a result. “That worries me.”
It would. Any hint of a play being suppressed would trigger a reaction in someone whose own work often factors in themes of censorship and political freedom.
For more than three decades, Tom Stoppard the playwright has been actively involved in human rights issues, working with Amnesty International, and showing solidarity with political dissidents, those in Central and Eastern Europe in particular. (Tom Stoppard is Czech by birth. He was born Tomáš Straüssler, to Jewish parents, in the town of Zlín, home to the Bata shoe company.
The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 forced the family to flee – first to Singapore, then to Australia, then to India, and finally to England, when the war ended. Dr. Straüssler was killed by the Japanese in Singapore, and Mrs. Straussler married again in Australia, this time to a British Army major. That was when Tomáš Straüssler was given the name Tom Stoppard.)
Sir Tom has been here for more than three weeks, arriving well ahead of the five-day literary festival, as a guest at Sun House, the Galle home of festival founder Geoffrey Dobbs. Enough time to settle in and get a rudimentary feel, even develop an affection, for the country. And, yes, he has been closely following the local news.
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| Tom Stoppard at the Galle Literary Festival. Photo: Indika Handunwela |
During the talk show that afternoon the playwright had paused to express gratitude for the “great warmth and kindness” shown him during his stay. The thank-you came unexpectedly, almost as a non sequitur halfway through the conversation, the playwright slowing down and choosing his words carefully. You had the impression of someone who, though only on a visit, was making an effort to understand, even bond, with the country.
Unfortunately, we had not much more news to share. It was only later that weekend that the full story, the real-life drama or plot behind the play, started emerging – that the dismissed school principal was in fact a victim; that unknown to the principal the script was changed at the last minute by a staff member who wanted to ruin the headmaster’s career; and that the principal had enemies outside the school who were out to get him. The plot could thicken further, with more surprises to follow, all adding up to a complex and intriguing story – a play within a play, if you like – with enough twists to excite the imagination of a writer famed for fascinating plots and narrative somersaults.
As a matter of fact, moving on to other things, Sir Tom hinted that he was mulling the idea of a play set in Sri Lanka, which came as great news. What Sri Lankan theatre or literature fan would not be thrilled at the thought of the famous playwright plotting a theatre piece with a local mise-en-scène?
Earlier that afternoon, in the Hall de Galle, in conversation with moderator Tracy Holsinger, Tom Stoppard described his stage plays as he saw them, which was not always how critics and academics understood them. He was insistent that when he sat down to write a play, it was only on a purely creative hunch or urging, and that none of his plays was prompted by an impulse to deliver a message. The message was something critics and academics felt obliged to find. And the original prompting that put the play in the writer’s head, and how that story unfolded on the page, was part of the mystery of art. And that mystery was best left alone.
“Art is a mystery that we don’t dare to look at,” Sir Tom said. “I am sensitive to appeals of various kinds. In writing a play, I am the beneficiary of my subconscious. I am susceptible to something that defies reason. I worship reason, but I also understand that I don’t work from reason. I have no academic interest in my work. I do not write anything to be studied. I am resistant to analytical scrutiny. The main problem is that people tend to assume that the play is the end product of a set of ideas or thoughts, when in fact the ideas or thoughts are the end product of the play.”
The playwright went on to assert that the written play was an inert object waiting to come alive on the stage. “Theatre is not a text, it is an event,” Sir Tom said, and producing a play is “translating a text into an event. The play on your desk is a transcript of that event that has yet to take place.”
Expanding on the “oddness and strangeness” of art – on “what is spooky about art,” Sir Tom proposed that good and great art is where “rules are broken all the time”.
“The breakage is the art,” he said, and drew an example from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. He cited an extraordinary moment when a character in the play turns and confides to the audience, at which point the fourth wall of conventional theatre, the imaginary wall that separates actors from audience, vanishes. “The fourth wall shatters in that instant,” Sir Tom said, and the art “is in the heat of the smash.” And an instant later, the fourth wall is back in place.
Later that day, at the literary dinner held in his honour, at the Galle Fort heritage home The Edens, Tom Stoppard emphasised his stand on the playwright as artist – that his craft is a “self-sufficient process”, using “experience and intuition”, which gets under way when he picks up a pencil and starts writing – and listening. “When you are writing a play, you are making a noise in your head.”
Denouement – the surprise revelation that is the climax of a certain class of theatre entertainment – does not interest Sir Tom, who said it would be more interesting to take an Agatha Christie mystery, for example, and reveal the killer at the start of the play and then work forwards.
Relaxing later at the Amangalla, Sir Tom continued to answer questions about his plays. “I don’t really have an agenda in a play. I have areas of interest. But sometimes it is an emotional interest, rather than an intellectual one. To be frank, although I am quite happy to talk about the plays, I don’t talk the way I think. I don’t really ask myself the questions that I am asked about them.
“I feel quite strongly that the play should be in charge of the writer, to some extent, perhaps to a large extent. One of the things I feel quite strongly is that it is quite healthy not to know too much about the play you are writing. Because I think that if you know everything about the play you are writing, and simply fulfill the programme, you’ll end up with a play which is quite brittle, and won’t have any, as it were, organic life, whereas if you try to follow where it’s taking you, and just try to be true to the psychology of character and situation, with any luck, and luck is the word, in a way, things will come out better. I always feel, and very often say, that when a play works out well, the writer ought to feel lucky, rather than clever.”
Like many, or most, true artists, Tom Stoppard waits patiently for the auspicious moment, the flash, that tells him he has received the inspiration for new, fresh work. “There is a moment, and it almost is a moment, where one thinks, Hurray, I have got one more play in me, just on the basis of one thought.
“I was very interested in Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech where he described the beginnings of a play he wrote, called The Homecoming, and it began with a very ordinary line, something like, “Where have you put the scissors.” He said he had this moment of vision, which could have meant anything and could have led anywhere, and that was the starting point, rather than, for example, meeting a fascinating character and saying to oneself, Oh, I must write a play about this fascinating person.
“That doesn’t work for me, certainly. But I also don’t terribly want to go in for self-examination. It’s like a superstition. It might go away.”
Sir Tom described how he came to write one of his favourite plays, a haunting fantasia about the English poet A. E. Housman, author of the much loved and admired book of poems, “A Shropshire Lad”, which came out in 1896.
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| Sir Tom at the book signing. Photo: Hasitha Kulasekera |
“There are plays which I have relished writing, enjoyed getting into. There’s a play called The Invention of Love, about the poet A. E. Housman, That’s a play which came from simply a moment when I heard, for the very first time, goodness knows how I hadn’t heard it before, that Housman was considered by many to be the greatest Latin scholar, a textual critic of Latin texts, of his generation, and indeed for several generations.
“And I thought of a play about somebody who wrote the kind of poetry he wrote, on the one hand – in other words, a play about a romantic person who is also a classical person. And indeed on the first page of the play, when he is greeted by the ferryman of the Underworld, the ferryman says, ‘I thought you were two different people.’
“And I like the poems, and I like Latin, and I had a most wonderful time doing what other people might call research. But to me it was just pure enjoyment, and I had to force myself to stop preparing and stop reading and start writing. In fact, I was a year late with that play because I was having such a good time getting to the top of Page One. So I think of that play with a certain affection.
Just a week earlier we had received an e-mail from Bradley Winterton, a book critic and travel writer based in the Far East, who said The Invention of Love was “the best play I know on gay love, and it’s written by a heterosexual.”
Sir Tom expanded on the play and its themes. “It actually comes from the ancient world, where love between men has a different social resonance, and I was interested in the poets whom Housman was a critic of. It’s called The Invention of Love because, in a way, the ancient world didn’t make a huge distinction between straight love and gay love. And some of the most moving love poetry in existence is from the Greek anthology. There’s an anthology of fragments, really, and my play quotes some of them… There was one writer, called Theognis of Megara. Wonderful, wonderful, marvellous little insights into what it feels like to be in love or be a rejected lover.
“There’s a fragment from a lost play of Sophocles in which Sophocles compares love to holding an icicle in your hand – because it hurts to hold and it hurts to let go.
Now, speaking to somebody in Sri Lanka, I might have to explain that. When you are a kid in winter in England, or in India, North India, where I was as a kid . . . it’s the perfect metaphor. You are holding an icicle and it hurts, and when you try to detach it from your skin, it hurts even more. It’s wonderful!
“If Housman had fallen in love with a young woman, I would have still written the play.”
The conversation moves on to the Galle Literary Festival itself, and the success it has been. We said this time last year festival goers were let down rather badly when a couple of invited writers, among them a Nobel Prize winner and a Booker Prize winne, failed to turn up in Galle, despite committing to the festival. Their non-appearance was attributed to a boycott call from a Paris-based international organisation that works for freedom of information and freedom of the press. Indignant festival-goers wanted to know why a literary festival had to answer for questions on freedom of speech that should have been directed elsewhere.
“The literary festival here is a society of liberal cosmopolitans, it’s been said to me,” said Sir Tom, “and I consider the presence of writers like myself from abroad to be an imprimatur for the values which the festival represents, not an imprimatur for the government.
"It is important for the subject, or the issue, or the topic, of things like censorship here, human rights, and so on . . . it’s important that those subjects shouldn’t be avoided or neglected. It’s a moral maze, as the phrase has it, in many countries. But I don’t believe in isolationism. I don’t believe in cultural boycott.”
Did Sir Tom have anything else, relating to his visit, that he would like to tell us?
“Well, look, I can tell you that I have been trying to start a play in Sri Lanka for the last month. And I know everything about it except the one necessary thing, which is: What is the story? And until I have an inkling of that, I cannot write anything. Drama is a story-telling art form. I take the problem back with me.”
We wished him well with the play and the resolution of the problem.
The concepts of “utopia” and “arcadia” are often used in connection with paradisal Sri Lanka, and these same words figure in the titles of a couple of works of Tom Stoppard, who has also written a play set in India. The idea of Sri Lanka, as an actuality or as a theatre metaphor, should therefore be barely a step away in the copious, ingenious, play-constructing imagination of Sir Tom. |
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