Tom stoppard, p.14
Tom Stoppard, page 14
As usual Stoppard was doing several things at once, in between bursts of writer’s block. He finished with Samuel Boot, started, without results, to think about his novel, and turned Walk on the Water into a two-act play. The German theatre publishing and production company, Rowohlt Theater-Verlag, was on the lookout for any promising new talent, and set up a month’s run for Stoppard’s play—to be called, in German, Old Riley Walked the Water—starting in July at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. It was a very large space to fill with an untried play in translation. Stoppard went to rehearsals and was embarrassed, he told Anthony Smith, “by their enthusiasm, by the size of the theatre, by the earnest discussion of psychological motivation.” He hid behind “a frozen smile” the thought: “You fools, the emperor is starkers.”
His fears were not groundless. The Hamburg audience, used to exciting British imports like the Beatles, was expecting a combination of Beckett, Pinter, a long-haired Beatle-lookalike and an Angry Young Man. In the event, they watched a play about an ageing self-deceiving dreamer in a domestic, suburban setting. Half the audience, relieved to have seen something they understood, cheered and clapped. The other, younger half booed loudly, “in a storm of gleeful abuse.” Stoppard was dragged on stage to receive this mixed accolade, and stood there in a daze, for all the world like Henry James on the first night of his play The American. “The thought flashed across my mind that they thought I was Jewish…” At the time, “bowing inanely into a thousand seats of boos and bravos,” it just seemed weird and hilarious, but then he felt depressed, and “furious that I’d let WOTW represent me as a writer first time out.” He knew this was a false start, not an inglorious ending. Walk was done again in Vienna in 1966 as The Spleen of George Riley. It got a new title and much reworking before it played in London in 1968 as Enter a Free Man. By that time he felt very distant from it.
But he had the other idea to work on. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Court of King Lear took shape as a one-act play in which, he told Anthony Smith, the characters were “Fortinbras, Captain, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Player, King Lear and Horatio, not forgetting Hamlet,” and most of the action took place on the ship going to England. Stoppard came to refer to this as a “one-act verse burlesque.” But the verse in it is all Shakespeare’s, interleaved with two kinds of prose. There were large dollops of Shakespearean pastiche, mainly spoken by Hamlet and Lear (“I see lunatics about me, every one as mad as the other”). And there were cryptic, witty, philosophical one-liners or rapid dialogue (“Who are you? where have you come from?,” etc.), spoken by “Ros” and “Guil” and the Player, who, fleeing from Elsinore after his performance in the court play, wears a mask to look like Hamlet: “I am a ham player, friend.” Ros and Guil banter with the Player, asking him to make the time pass with something more exciting than just “incidents.” The Player swaps places with Hamlet, Ros and Guil land in England, meet the mad King Lear, who is not at all funny, and are put to death. The Player goes back to Elsinore to take part in the final act of Hamlet, and the real Hamlet gets back in time to see “the final tableau of carnage,” but too late to do anything. “He is a man stuck in space,” Stoppard commented, adding: “It is a bit screwy, but fun.” Hamlet leaves the play asking: “What of me now? There is no end for a man caught out of the action.” Now he must perpetually “walk the earth,” a ghostly wanderer like his father. The play ends with his final speech, much in debt to T. S. Eliot:
I have time.
The sun is going down.
It will be night soon.
Do you think so?
I was just making conversation.
I have a lot of time.
In the later version of the play, “I was just making conversation” is Rosencrantz’s line. This early travesty of Hamlet, like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern which grew out of it, is about swapped and uncertain identities, role-playing, wordplay, questions of choice and fate, and—as in Waiting for Godot—how to pass one’s mortal time. But in this version, Hamlet is at the centre, wearily estranged from his own play, a superfluous man left with no purpose on this earth. The emphasis is more on him and less on Ros and Guil, though they do get some of the badinage of the later version.
Ewing read it and wrote, shrewdly, that he “very much liked the characters of R and G and their cross-talk, but [was] not so happy about the fact that in the end this becomes a play about Hamlet.” He noted a “danger that the play drops to a parody of Shakespearian style.” Stoppard knew there was more work to be done, but he was “fond of the play.” Now called Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, it had an outing in a small studio theatre in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm, for a couple of nights in September. This was the work of the amateur Questors Theatre, a community enterprise in Ealing run by Alfred Emmet, who had an eye for new writers. James Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You was first staged there. They had recommended Saunders to the Colloquium, and he in turn invited some of their actors to come to Berlin and stage five short plays by members of the Colloquium. They then took the plays to their theatre in Ealing. Stoppard directed his own play, as unusual an enterprise for him as appearing in a film. Unfortunately the Rosencrantz was “a total amnesiac when it comes to lines, and all is panic.” He asserted his authority: “You should see me doing my Guthrie, striding about chain-smoking…” As soon as he got back to England, he started to rewrite it as a full-length play.
8
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
G: Who are you? where have you come from? where are you going? what are you going to do, how are you going to do it? and when?
Player: Why?
G: And why?
His return to England at the end of 1964 was a fraught moment. He needed to “write like a madman,” he told Anthony Smith, and he wanted to live “by himself.” Perhaps he should go back to Bristol. He didn’t see how he could afford to live in London, far less “support a fellow human.” But Jose was offering to find them a flat in London. He thought the situation “somehow has developed much more in her head than in mine.” All the same, they found a place in Pimlico, at 11 Vincent Square Mansions in Walcott Street, in the quiet streets of red-brick mansion flats between Vincent Square and the thundering traffic of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, near the river. It was a first-floor flat with the rooms opening out from a long corridor. Piers Paul Read had two tiny rooms, Derek Marlowe had another, and Stoppard and Jose were sharing a big room. Letters home, however, with details about his rent for the flat (£2 9s 0d a week including rates), his quest for second-hand furniture and Derek’s cooking (“liver, potatoes and sprouts”), didn’t mention her. But one of the letters describing life at Vincent Square Mansions said suddenly: “I can’t work unless I’m on my own”—something he would often say again. Read had the strong impression that he had wanted to drop Jose, and would have preferred to be on his own: “and she said no.”
Derek Marlowe, when he wasn’t out and about with beautiful women and rock bands, including the future members of The Who, was writing a theatrical adaptation of Gorky’s The Lower Depths, and finishing his spy novel, A Dandy in Aspic. Spies were everywhere in the mid-sixties. Dandy was about a double agent who ended up having to assassinate himself, which Stoppard thought a dazzling idea, and Marlowe wrote it to the soundtrack of the year, the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.”
These three good-looking, ambitious, highly talented young men, trying to make their way by their writing in the mid-sixties with very little to live on, all spent a lot of time thinking about money, success and fame. Marlowe remembered the three of them in the flat, in 1965, watching Top of the Pops (which had started up the year before). Mick Jagger, Stoppard’s rock hero, was singing “Satisfaction.” The three of them sat around talking about how the Stones were going to be millionaires. Which of them would make their first million dollars? “They all thought Tom would be it, the first person, not a question of top dog, but big money, ie more than half-a-crown.”
Marlowe, as it turned out, got there first, but burned out later. He and Read would look on at Stoppard’s career, increasingly from a distance but always with attention and admiration. They never lost that sense of having started out together, or that combative young-man rivalry. Stoppard sent Read careful, critical letters about some of his novels. Marlowe exchanged occasionally rueful remarks with Read about Stoppard’s successes, as when reading Jumpers: “I just wanted to see if it read as pretentiously as it played. It does.” When Kenneth Tynan wrote about Stoppard in 1977 for the New Yorker, he interviewed Marlowe, and cited him on the lack of emotion in Stoppard’s plays and his inability to understand women. Marlowe told Read, mortified, that he had been badly misquoted. Tom, however, had been forgiving: “Tom in his wisdom was Tom.” Marlowe died too young, in 1996, after a wildly volatile career and personal life. His son wrote to Piers Paul Read: “Sadly he will never fulfil his ambitions…He was immensely proud of how much all three of you had achieved since the days, back in 1964, of flat sharing in Pimlico.”
Jose was the odd one out. Read was preoccupied with a tumultuous love affair and his Berlin novel, but was aware of considerable turmoil going on at Vincent Square. Jose made scenes, and more than once threatened to kill herself. In one diary entry of the time, Read coolly noted: “Friction in the flat. Derek and Jose attack me, saying I am ‘cold.’ Jose angry that I have no time for her private life, threats of suicide, etc.”
Isabel, meanwhile, sat down to write a letter, probably at the end of 1964, and probably never sent. She said that she had become aware that she did care for him much more than she had ever realised. They had so much in common, they talked and got on so well, that it would be pointless—as he’d often said to her—not to go on and on. She had always loved him in her fashion, but it had taken her ages to commit. Yes, she knew there was Jose: but he didn’t really love her, did he? Though she could be wrong.
These thoughts had come too late. He let himself go along with Jose’s anxious need for reassurance and commitment. Towards the end of 1964, she proposed, and he agreed. (Isabel also got married, to her Yugoslavian boyfriend, late in 1967, and he went to her wedding.) They were going to get married in Scotland, where his parents were then living, and where Jose’s sister was organising everything “like Montgomery.” The wedding between “T. Stoppard, Writer, Bachelor; Parents: Kenneth Frederick Stoppard, Sales Manager, Martha Eugenia Stoppard, previously M. S. Beck,” and “Jose Ingle, Information Officer, Spinster,” took place in St. Ninian’s Episcopal Church, Troon, in Ayrshire, on 26 March 1965. He was twenty-eight and she was three years younger. His brother Peter was the witness. Settled as a chartered accountant in Long Ashton, in Bristol, in the house their parents used to live in, he had beaten his brother to it by a few years, and married Lesley Wilkes in 1961, with Tom as their best man. That happy marriage would last long years, until her death in 2016.
An undated page of typescript sent to Isabel imagined a wedding day from the bride’s point of view, like a drowning man’s life “spinning” before his eyes.
Only I wasn’t drowning. I was walking down an aisle to be married and, faint heart, was weary of it all…I knew I was panicking…This great step into the vast black unknown was more than a gamble. It was a mystery. Whatever happened after we spoke those solemn vows, meant to be taken seriously, spoken at the time with quiet determination by the parties concerned and forgotten generally within the year like a second rate film, I knew nothing about…Any other girl, I told myself severely…would be thrilled. The happiest day of her life, she’s nailed him to the tree. Now he’s here, all here, for at least the next year or two. Then, sex weary of her, he’ll gladly cast an eye askance…
The female narrator imagines the prospect of divorce, supposes that the bridegroom will be too hung over from the last night’s party to remember anything about the wedding, and expects that this day will be looked back on as an excuse “to nag. And blame. Condemn and shame.”
* * *
—
“What with the marriage business and all,” he wrote ruefully to his parents, writing had been interrupted. He needed to get on. The Stoppards went on living in Vincent Square for another year or so. But he also had a room in Soho which he was using as a writing space, by courtesy of an intriguing Scotsman, Gordon Williams, a colleague at Scene, who, in between ghost-writing footballers’ memoirs, wanted to write an anarchic Goon Show–style radio serial. A fragment of their collaboration survives as Doctor Masopust, I Presume, in which a crazed surgeon orders an imaginary orchestra about, in a first glimpse of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (“How can my enemies hope to destroy a man who has his own orchestra?”) and spouts patriotic speeches, a bit like George Riley—and Ken Stoppard: “Men of England…the bulldog breed, yeomen sons of this green and pleasant land, this other Eden set in a silver sea…I have come here to warn England against the menace of the new Europe—and if necessary to assume total power to protect the Great British from the clutching hands across the Channel.” (Britain had been trying to join the European Economic Community since 1961.) The partnership, in emulation of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, authors of the hit TV series The Likely Lads, came to nothing, but Williams went on to write a novel which was adapted by Sam Peckinpah as Straw Dogs. He also wrote what Stoppard considered to be the most telling book about journalism apart from Scoop, The Upper Pleasure Garden.
Another false start, also to do with patriotic rhetoric and the end of empire—against the background of the 1960s rush to independence of former British colonies—was a radio play meant for a series on the seven deadly sins. Stoppard chose Gluttony, and drew heavily on Waugh’s Black Mischief. His play was set on the imaginary island of Baku, in the Arabian Sea. It has a missionary, William Moon, “a sweet old man with the best intentions, without a clue about what is going on,” a supporter of the passing empire, Sir Evelyn Travers, a gluttonous British Governor, Sir Dudley, and a beaming African postmaster-general who turns out to be masterminding the revolution. The Brits have their heads in the sand (“your average Baku islander is loyal and grateful, perfectly content with his lot, spends his time sitting around, harvesting the coconuts and so forth, singing hymns, dancing the bossa nova, playing baseball”) and end up, mostly, being cooked and eaten. The episode was not aired.
A more rewarding piece of colonial writing was “A Student’s Diary.” This was an (unlikely) commission from the BBC World Service to contribute episodes in a drama series for its Arabic Service, to be written in English and translated into Arabic. It was a godsend: 27 guineas for each fifteen-minute script, with 135 guineas on signature. The drama ran from April 1966 until February 1969; Stoppard wrote nearly seventy episodes during 1966 and 1967, alternating with another writer. The series told the story of Amin Osman, a Muslim from Jordan who comes to England to study at a large medical school in London. Stoppard referred to it as “Ali in Wonderland,” a joke which, like the series’ treatment of immigration and cross-cultural misunderstandings, was very much of its time.
Amin, the naive traveller from another world learning the customs of the country, encounters false and true mentors. The first Englishman he meets on the ferry, an affable Brummie who warns him not to call it the French Channel, turns out to be a cocaine smuggler. Such cautionary tales abound. A girl Amin likes goes off with his best friend; a fellow student (called “Farlowe”) is killed in a car crash after having one drink too many. Everyone he meets teaches him something about England: that the English would “form an orderly queue to get into heaven,” that there is a north–south divide, what Guy Fawkes Night is about.
There were a lot of episodes to fill, and Stoppard mined his old Brennus columns ruthlessly—a hospital student rag, for instance, is lifted straight from Bristol. He didn’t think anyone he knew would ever hear it. Amin’s Jordanian background was left pretty vague—as far as Kenneth Ewing knew, “he had never met an Arab in his life.” Bits of himself got into the story. He mugged up on medical textbooks (one episode is all about blood vessels), perhaps thinking of Dr. Sträussler. In an exchange about wasting time, Amin says: “I tend to put off my work until the last moment, but at the same time I don’t seem to do very much with the time I leave empty. It stays empty.” A conservative countryman inveighs against “the forces of radical protest,” grimly foreseeing “a liberal utopia in which traditions have given way to a uniformity that gives no offence but little joy.” Amin’s irrepressible optimism has an autobiographical tinge: “Who knows where fate will lead me now? The prospects are unlimited!”
His own prospects seemed unlimited but uncertain. A student production of The Gamblers was put on in Bristol by Anthony Smith in May 1965, which Stoppard went to with Jose, but he would have preferred that play to be forgotten about. The screenwriter Ted Willis rewrote A Paragraph for Mr. Blake without telling him, so that when he took Jose to the recording for Associated Television at Elstree, he found it was full of “corny scenes” he hadn’t written.
Still, he was doing other things for radio and TV, though thinking of them only as “stepping stones towards getting a play on the boards”: “I wanted to be in the theatre.” The radio proposals came from the BBC script editor Richard Imison, a generous supporter of new writers, who had liked the “Just Before Midnight” plays. He pounced on Stoppard, “Tigger-like,” in the corridor of the BBC one day, with an idea for some plays about people in imaginary jobs or peculiar occupations. Stoppard immediately thought of the Speaking Clock. Since the 1930s the British public could dial up “TIM,” and hear a polite, clipped woman’s voice, sounding rather like the young Queen, telling them what the exact time would be “at the third stroke.” He came up with the brilliant “wheeze” that this woman could be slowly cracking up, her interior monologue, “something half-way between prose and verse,” counterpointing her public time-telling voice. He thickened the plot by having her devoted husband, a bus driver, thinking she is being held hostage by the Post Office (“I want my Gladys!”) and by scenes in which the desperate bus driver is put off the scent by the bureaucratic figures who control the “dial-up” services, an essential part of the fabric of British life: “We must keep a continuous check on all of them, because if you don’t keep an eye on them they slide back.”
