The Sunday Times, January 1980
It seems to me that you never meet your heroes on equal terms – not even at tea-time in the Texas Pancake House in Charing Cross Road where Tom Stoppard and I deliberated together over the nutritious merits of a Shiloh as opposed to a Louisiana Lemon and eventually settled for a couple of coffees.
Engaging as he was, and flatteringly well briefed in the vicissitudes of my own career, I could not quite put from my mind the fact that he had not only written but alsounderstood all of the arguments in Jumpers and that he, as much as anybody, had scared me away from ever attempting to write for the theatre. Quit while you’re behind is my motto.
It therefore came as an agreeable illustration of Stoppard’s own character when he admitted that he had suffered a certain nervousness himself when Otto Preminger had asked him to adapt Graham Greene’s novel The Human Factor for the cinema.
“To be honest if Otto had said I can’t pay you but you’ll get one or two lunches with Graham Greene I might have done the job,” he says. “I was much more nervous of displeasing Graham Greene than I was of displeasing Otto. One doesn’t want to monkey around with Graham Greene.
“Ironically that should have been the least of my fears. Graham Greene has now seen the film and he said how surprised he was that I had stayed so close to the novel. He even suggested that should there be a next time I should feel free to take more liberties with the work.”
There was one slightly sticky moment, though, when Preminger felt that he needed a longer flashback to Africa to explain the love story which is the core of the book. Graham Greene wasn’t keen on this idea; nor was Stoppard.
In the end Stoppard wrote about 16 pages of his own. It is these scenes he will be most interested in seeing, he says, not having yet seen the finished film although it is opening next week. “I believe they had a showing the other night but nobody bothered to invite me. It’s always the same with films, isn’t it?” he says and laughs.
Nor was he present at the filming when a considerable scrum of big names (Gielgud, Attenborough, Jacobi, et al) were queuing up for their marks. “I was not free to be there,” he says. “The best definition of film making I know is John Boorman’s, who said: ‘It is the business of turning money into light and then back into money again.’
“A film set is also the triumph of all the forces in life which exist to ensure that the maximum number of people are wasting the most time at the biggest cost to the smallest advancement at any given moment.”
The good thing about Otto Preminger, says Stoppard, is that he does stick to the script. “And The Human Factor isn’t the sort of piece where actors and directors change the dialogue. I remember the only time I encountered Burt Reynolds he was sitting in a smoke-filled caravan with a director and they were scribbling away at a screenplay that someone had clearly been paid a great deal of money to write. And when I was introduced to him he looked up and said: ‘Hello, can you do anything about these last 20 pages?’”
He finds that very funny. He appears to be amused by most things about film-making. It is, he says, astonishing to him that films are not rehearsed more. He feels very much at home in a rehearsal room working on his plays with actors. And indeed he maintains that until the play has been rehearsed and until he has seen it performed before an audience he cannot be absolutely sure of what are the relative values within any particular two minutes.
“I’m quite a good counter puncher,” he says, I can look at a scene and think ‘that could be different’. So I often do quite a lot of minor tinkering. In the case of Night and Day I rewrote six pages three months after it had opened because they were inert. Now they are definitely ert. I can’t think of any play I have written that has been the same in the second edition as it was in the first.”
He is a youthful looking 42, a man who clearly relishes being the most highly praised playwright in the world. When I first met him I thought of the old line about the captain of the school cricket team. But a little later on as I observed him being photographed in the middle of Charing Cross Road, calm, helpful and seemingly unselfconscious while traffic shaved his thighs, left and right, it struck me how enormously he must enjoy being the star.
I put it to him that his work is now studied for A-levels. At first he tried to make a joke about how worrying it was that standards had dropped so far. But then he dropped the false modesty and added how good it was that the system has loosened up and liberalised itself so much. When he was at school they didn’t even do anything as contemporary as T. S. Eliot.
At the moment he is writing two lectures which he has to give at Cambridge later this year on the subject of the distinction between theatre as an event and theatre as a text. He promised to write them two years ago and has only now found time to work of them.
He is also astonishingly prolific but when I asked him what he wanted to do in the future he frowned and said that was a good question and then paused before saying: “When I was 25 or even 32 that question could have been happily answered by what I’ve now done. But it seems to be an ever-receding grail.
“I’d like to write a play which is as good as the play I think I’m capable of writing. But unfortunately, inevitably, the edge is blunted once one has had a play on. Before I’d had a play performed I couldn’t imagine anything as dreamlike as that. But that was 15 years ago when there seemed to be more excitement about the theatre than there is now.”
He thought about this for a little while longer and then added: What I’m really saying is that when I started I wrote a play because I wished to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright. It’s not quite the same thing.”
