directed by blanka zizka
NEWS & NOTES
A CONVERSATION WITH TOM STOPPARD
A WILMA THEATER SYMPOSIUM
Symposium Transcript: December 4, 1999
Transcribed by Carrie Ryan
Blanka Zizka: The Wilma produced in 1995 Travesties, the first production that we did by Tom Stoppard, and then we opened the theater with Arcadia. Then we did On the Razzle, and this year we'll open with The Invention of Love, which begins rehearsals on January 4. Tom has become a great friend of the theater. It's really great to have you here so much. Thank you. It's wonderful. Tom, you have worked in theater for such a long time, but you have also been so successful in movies, in television, television plays, and radio plays. You have written a novel; you have written many essays; and yet you come always back to playwriting. What is it about writing plays that brings you back to it over and over and over again?
Tom Stoppard: It's probably because that's how I started. I mean, I was a journalist first. I didn't write to get out of journalism; I liked being a journalist, I enjoyed it. But at the time in England, the theater had a lot of interest being focused on it. And I think, partly out of a kind of vanity, a lot of us were choosing to write plays, whereas the previous generation were trying to write novels. So I got into the theater partly because of this historical accident, partly because I had been writing about theater in the city where I was working. We had a very good theater, two or three of them. So I'd had some exposure to being back stage; I was friendly with some of the actors, and so on. I think I got bitten by the right bug at the time. I thought of myself as being a playwright from the moment anybody ever thought they might put a play of mine on. All of the other things I'd do were detours, temporary diversions. And I still feel like that. I've never tried to analyze why I made the choice-I'm not even aware that it even was a choice, as such. It suited me. I found it dangerous and exciting; it's quite a dangerous occupation in a trivial way. For reasons of character perhaps, I tended to make everything into some species of comedy, and if you write any kind of comedy, there's really no experience like being among an audience. And you think I'm going to say it's them laughing at your jokes, but there's truly no experience like a pin-drop silence at what you thought was a good joke . I always feel that writers of tragedy are unfortunate because there's no discernible distinction between an enraptured audience and one that's asleep.
BZ: I know exactly what you mean. We had such a great time working on Travesties. Travesties is so full of ideas, and it's so inventive that it becomes contagious when you work on it. The ideas are just flying through the air. But then, one night, the audience came, and we didn't have the timing yet. It was the first night and there was this silence. I was terrified. I thought, "What did we do to this play? It's supposed to be funny." It was the next day with a little adjustment of timing. Comedy is so difficult just because of that. It's technical. You are a comedy writer, but when I talk to you many times I hear this worried voice saying, "I don't know if I will ever write a new play, if I will ever get a new idea." Then you get an idea, and you surround yourself with books, you are doing all this research. You are saying, "I don't know if I will ever get to writing it." And when you start writing it and you say, "It's going so slowly, it's so painful." And I'm thinking, somebody who, when you read the play you get so much pleasure from reading it, so amusing, so inventive, and yet you seem like you have been going through a process of pain.
TS: Firstly, I think writers are lucky no matter how much pain they have; they should try some other way of earning a living to find out about pain. The problems I have which I talk about, there's so little happening during the writing. The play's words, as you get them on the play, they don't take that long to write-three or four months maybe. All my complaining comes before that. I complain that I've got nothing to write about. And then I complain that I don't know how to use the stuff that I've researched. And there's a lot of whinging going on there. But, as a matter of fact, it's all a sort of superstition, like some kind of a rain-dance, you have to go through this ritual when you start so you feel that you've officiated all the grievance gods. And after that, with any luck, you're always capitalizing on the tiny progress you've made. So, in other words, writing one line that you're happy with is tremendously encouraging, it's as though you're feeding on some form of confidence satisfaction, which might even have a chemical version that has something to do with adrenaline. If you get just two lines down which look OK, it gives you the feeling that you're capable of writing a third . And when you don't have any, you don't feel capable of writing the first. So you're always building on what you have. And I tend to overvalue the first page or two; I'm so amazed and surprised I managed to get anything down at all, it often seems to be much better than it really is and I have to fix it. It is true, that I don't have anything each time. You're right about that, I don't have anything each time. I never have two or three things waiting to be turned into plays. With this play, actually, the one you're doing, it was the first time ever where I'd found something I wanted to write about while the last play, the previous play, was still warm. It had just opened.
BZ: It was Arcadia, right?
TS: It was Arcadia. And I remember thinking, "Oh well, for once, I can have another play within a year and half, instead of three or four years." It worked out to three or four years anyway. Although I'd found something I liked, I liked reading about it so much I found I couldn't stop. In the end, I only stopped the research because I was running out of time. I had a deadline to deliver the play, and I was still doing Latin scholarship.
BZ: Let's talk a little bit about Housman, A.E. Housman. What was it about Housman that excited you so much to write a play about him?
TS: Housman is a poet. He died in his seventies in 1936, so he was just a bit younger than, say, Oscar Wilde. And he is known, in England, for a collection of poetry, which was published in 1896 and has never been out of print, and it's called A Shropshire Lad. I'm not saying that in general people know the actual poetry, although many do. Many people know the title of the book without quite remembering who wrote it, and so forth. He's part of literary culture of a certain, of a conservative kind. As a matter of fact, he only published two collections of poetry, the second one was published in the same year as The Waste Land and Ulysses, so he really is occupying a very curious place in the history of English literature. He's quite an anomalous figure. He was very popular as a poet, not that his book took off from the beginning. But during the First World War, which was twenty years after it was written, it seemed that almost every soldier in the trenches had a copy of A Shropshire Lad in his pocket. They published it in a little tiny square book that would fit into a battle dress pocket. And there were hundreds of thousands of copies, and as I said he's never been out of print. He's also got a very, very good track record, almost as good as Shakespeare, pound for pound, page for page, of supplying titles for other works in English literature. Like Dennis Potter, Blue Remembered Hills. I don't even know if you know who Dennis Potter is.
VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Yes.
TS: Thank you. So he's got an important place on the map. I'm not answering your question.
BZ: The play is set up as a dream, and we start on the River Styx. Housman is waiting, and Charon arrives in his boat, and he's supposed to take Housman to Hades. But he's waiting for another person. Charon thinks that he's bringing another body, but actually Housman is both people, poet and scholar. So let's talk a little bit about the other side of Housman as well.
TS: There were enormous amounts of people who knew Housman as a poet and had no idea at all that he was perhaps the most eminent Latin scholar of his time. There was a small number of people who knew that he was an extraordinary Latin professor, who were only dimly aware that he had written poetry. In a very sort of simple way, I could say that the appeal was to write the play about two people who inhabited the same person. The first thing I knew about Housman was that he was a poet. I wanted to write a play about him almost instantly when I discovered the second thing about him, that he was a very, very brilliant textual critic of classical texts. I think it's fair to say that, at that moment, I thought, "Oh good, I can write a play about that man. I've got a subject." I didn't know he was homosexual. I knew nothing about him. It turns out, I think to the play's benefit, to be somewhat of a love story, probably more of a love story than anything, because of what happened to Housman. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford, he fell deeply and devotedly in love with another student called Moses Jackson, and remained devoted to Moses, who was a hetero jock, a rower, an athlete, remained devoted to him for the rest of his life. Consequently, he bottled up his emotions, and the poetry he wrote-I think there's no question about it-the poetry simply wouldn't have been written without this very, very painful love affair, which was never a love affair. Jackson died in 1933, as far as I remember. They were at Oxford together in the-where are we, back in the 1880s, if I remember -
BZ: Seventies. 1877.
TS: Eight, nine, right? Yes. They left Oxford, they came down with their degrees. Jackson was a scientist; he got a job with the Patent Office in London. Housman got a job in the same building; they were lodgers together at least at one London address. And then something terrible happened. Housman actually went missing for, I think, a week, six or seven days. And to the best of my knowledge, to this date nobody knows where he went or what he did in those six or seven days, nothing emerged from his correspondence, which is very scanty. You get the picture. He fell in love, he managed to remain close to and friendly with the object of his devotion, then there was some kind of a row and they went to live in different places. Jackson ultimately got a job in India, teaching, and Housman did indeed keep what you might call a diary or a journal. But it's about the least informative diary. Most of it is entirely blank. Some of it is devoted to stupid, occasional mentions of what wildflowers were in bloom. But here and there, here and there, there are these direct references to the man he loved. And this man is always called, "He." That's all you get. And when Jackson went to India-he got a job as headmaster of a college-you find in this diary a line like, "His boat reached Bombay at 8:40 am." So very early on when I was looking at Housman's stuff, I came across a photographic reproduction of that particular page in the diary: "His boat arrived Bombay.Ö" Even in the photograph, somehow the suppression of what's missing on that page is so powerful, you've got this instant sense of someone who's on the cross with love. And there we are. I don't imagine all of this is going to neatly show you the play. The play actually is deeply incomprehensible. You'll be really glad you came today. I've made it this sort of tremendously romantic thing, but he failed his degree. Nobody knows why. He was a brilliant student who should've gotten a first. If he'd gotten a second, his headmaster would have been really disappointed. If he'd gotten a third, it would have been a humiliation. In fact, he didn't get a first or a second or a third or a fourth or a pass, he actually got nothing. He failed. An utterly incomprehensible event that has never had a satisfactory explanation. And so this boy who should have gotten a fellowship from one of the colleges went to London and became a clerk, a lowly clerk, in this office where Moses Jackson held a relatively senior position. And this clerk after work would go to the British Museum and work among Latin texts. (He knew Greek but he chose Latin because he thought he couldn't excel at both languages.) And for ten years, this was the pursuit of his leisure hours. One day, ten years later, his fellow clerks at the office opened the newspaper and discovered that Housman, their fellow clerk was now professor of Latin at University College London. During these ten years he was quietly writing papers and articles which were getting published in the journals, at Oxford and Cambridge, also Dublin or other places, Glasgow. So, although nobody knew who the hell he was, he kept coming up with these amazing-well, no, precocious, I must say. I won't say he was heads-and-shoulders genius above his contemporaries; he wasn't. He had a tone of utter authority that really, he'd done nothing to earn . He was a failure who was a clerk. And when this chair fell vacant at University College London, he applied for it. And he applied in competition with people who had jobs at the various universities. And he was able to produce a dozen letters of support from the highest in the land.
BZ: Oscar Wilde makes an appearance toward the end of the play. Can you tell me about him, about why he's in this world?
TS: Wilde was in his last year at Oxford during Housman's first year. They never met, but it was a tremendous step forward for this play, because there was the possibility for some kind of opposition between two very, very different kinds of men, two very different kinds of artists, and two very different personalities responding in different ways to discovery of their own homosexuality. We have ultimately from our own perspective, we have a successful man who ended up revered and honored as a professor, who was admired, and so on. On the one hand we have a successful person whose life-and this is I think what the play does try to do, does try to show-whose life is essentially a failure in many ways. He failed to live his own personality. He didn't quite manage to live the expression of his personality. And he was a supposed success. Then this other man who crashed in flames, ended his life early and sick and fat and not very old and in public humiliation, we now see, for perfectly obvious reasons, as being somewhat of a heroic figure and a successful person. Certainly, you all know who he was, and what he wrote. So it was this tension between different sorts of success and failure which interested me.
BZ: The play is written like a dream-it is a dream-so you could say, "Well, in dream, anything could happen. Forget the structure." And yet there is an amazing dramatic structure in the play, and also very surprising. How did you arrive at that? Because that took some time, and I think that you were shuffling it around for a while.
TS: Yes. I don't find dialogue difficult, I'm lucky in that sense. If you're lucky enough to have this gift to some degree, then structure is the only problem when writing a play. It's always been the problem for me. And when I was young I used to try to solve this problem before I'd written the play, so I'd try to construct a shape so that I would feel comfortable and I'd know where I was going and how it was going to work and so on. With this play, and with Arcadia as a matter of fact, I just ran out of time in a way. I just thought I had to start. I had quite a bad time with The Invention of Love, I couldn't find the structure. I just kept writing it without quite knowing what I was doing or why I was doing it until much later. And in fact there was a certain point where I decided I'd gotten the acts in the wrong order, and I got to thinking about it. And then one day, "I see it, oh, I've written the wrong act first. I've written Act One and that's really Act Two. Maybe that's how it works." It was likely some kind of weird double helix and a rubic's cube. And in the meantime the director was waiting for it. I think he'd read half of it, and we were getting to rehearse it. And so I said, "So I've got it. All our problems are over. I've just got the acts in the wrong order." And he wisely kept very quiet. And then I realized that was no good either. And in the end, I did solve it by just taking the end of my first act and removing it to the end of the play. But there's always structure. There just is. I keep trying to write this, but I can't do it. I keep thinking I'd like to do one of these: if you had a plot that had so many corners in it, but was very, very, very clear, it had a hundred corners instead of six. Then, you'd build as a writer a really satisfying play which didn't have a memorable phrase in it. It wouldn't need one. The entire thing would be, "Oh my god, what happened there?" "Oh, oh, I get it." "Oh, I see it." "Oh, mother of God." You'd just keep this going for an hour and a half. It's an ambition of mine.
BZ: And then you'd come back to it a second time, and you'd know it all. You know, your plays, you always want to come back.
TS: Unfortunately, I corrupt this vision by literature, by the pen in my hand. I start writing all that is necessary.
BZ: We were talking about it a little before. I find it so concise, the way you write. There are a lot of ideas, obviously, in the play, but the writing itself is very concise. I was just mentioning the very beginning, and you always have fantastic beginnings of plays. Housman is waiting, and he says, "Well, I must be dead," as Charon is approaching. "Good." And in those two lines you find out so much about Housman, it's pretty amazing. You are very good at that.
TS: I'm aware that is actually very concise. I think I want to earn some credit for later.
BZ: There is a fantastic scene at the end of Act One, a long scene, but totally mesmerizing scene between old Housman and his younger self. And actually, at the very beginning he doesn't recognize himself. And I was thinking, "Wow. If our lives were not going to be documented by photography, would I recognize myself at the age of seventeen? Of course I recognize the person I fell in love with, because that was my life, but would I recognize myself?" You also have this fantastic way how the old Housman seduces the young Housman into the love of scholarship and love of knowledge. It's something that's a theme that is in your plays quite often, in Arcadia and now even more developed in The Invention of Love. Could you talk a bit about that?
TS: It puts a case for-I don't know if I stand behind this. I mean, I do. Yes, I mean to some degree, I must, otherwise it wouldn't interest me. He puts a case for the acquisition of knowledge as being almost what makes us human beings, knowledge for its own sake. At the further point, he's talking about useless knowledge; he's not talking about useful knowledge. Unless you live trying to know more, know things, whatever they are, then you're going out the way you came in. Housman says that useful knowledge is just an elaboration of the real human need, which is knowledge for its own sake whether it's useful or not. We're talking here about textual scholarship, which means we're talking about looking at a text which was written by somebody just over two thousand years ago-or actually exactly two thousand years ago for Housman-we're talking about some words on a page which have arrived for us through many generations just to get as far as the first printing machine. In other words, we're looking at words which originated in an autograph which was then copied by scribes, and everybody here who is or has a secretary knows it's already gone wrong there. And it's copied and recopied and recopied by monks in different monasteries, and some of them have bad handwriting, and some of them think that they know better than the original author-they start correcting his grammar-and after something like 1400 years this autograph, in a form which is often hideously corrupt, arrives at the invention of the printing press, whereupon it freezes for a moment and comes out in Venice or Florence or somewhere in 1400 or something as, "This is the poem by Propertius" or whoever. And then it gets progressively reprinted by other presses, and mistakes are made, and finally for us, we've got this Penguin. And it's gone through this sort of Jacob's Ladder of corruption. This is perhaps something I ought to have explained earlier when I was talking about Housman being a professor. That was his job. The job of a textual critic is to look at the Penguin, or in Housman's case whatever, and figure out what the corruptions are. In other words, to restore this text back to the form of the autograph as Propertius, using a stylus and some wet clay, as he wrote it in-Propertius, 14 something BC, I forget, it was so long ago. It's really, really interesting. I find it such an utterly fascinating procedure. This is why I was so happy for three years. I kept reading his papers and looking up the Latin and seeing why and how he was saying, "No, this line should be this, because you compare it to this version over there, and this one over there." It was incredibly, incredibly intricate. But the great thing about Housman was that it was very often done in a tone of weary sarcasm and utter despair at the appalling incompetence of his contemporary professors. So he wasn't a very popular person. And I just used two or three scraps of this voice, of him dealing with fellow professors. But I very much doubt that that tone would be possible nowadays among the academics in our fair cities. It's astonishingly rude.
BZ: When you write, Tom, do you have visual images of staging of the play, or do you hear the voices of the characters in your head?
TS: I used to think that the playwright's job was to describe the design in every detail. That illusion didn't last very long. Now I do have pictures in my head, but I don't really... I don't get very specific on the play. As matter of fact, I think with this particular play I said the least I've ever said about what we're looking at. Stage design, even during my relatively short time, has come on, and audiences have learned a different language of stage design taught to them by the designers. I used to be much more literal minded than I am nowadays. There's less need, less possibility of describing what the audience ought to be looking at. I think I should let the problems to a designer. I don't mind.
BZ: So what happens in that transition when you go from page into rehearsal, and then the play is taking on a physical life and what if it goes in a different direction than you imagined? Do you ever find tension there?
TS: As a matter of fact, with the first production, I was fortunate to be with it in many ways. It was quite dark because we were using slides; our basic design was a slide show. And for a slide to register properly you can't have a lot of ambient light. I really got a very quick look at what Blanka and her team are doing here, but it looks to me as though I'm going to like it a lot because there's the possibility of having much more light on this paradise. It's much nicer for me to leave a lot of decisions open, because it means there's more chance that different productions will have very little to do with each other. It's very depressing to go a thousand miles and see a show which is an attempt to simulate the original London production. That's not the idea.
BZ: You mentioned the Oxford paradise. There are four characters in the play, the professors from Oxford, that occupy quite a big chunk of the first act. Could you talk about the four of them?
TS: At this time, the late 1870s, the Oxford don reached the height of his-it was always his, of course-eminence and significance. The Master of Balliol College, for example, Benjamin Jowett, was a famous figure in the land. Professor of arts, fine arts, Ruskin, was a very famous figure in the land. Walter Pater, less famous, but very significant in literary culture. That kind of person, and it was not only Oxford but Oxford probably sort of had a higher profile, these people, I don't know that they were particularly great teachers; they were not necessarily great scholars. I mean Jowett was I suppose a great scholar of the Greek texts, despised by Housman. I think what Blanka is trying to prepare the ground for is simply the appearance of Ruskin, Jowett, Pater, and you're worried about the fourth person?
BZ: Pattison.
TS: Pattison was a relatively minor figure, but he was a major figure at Oxford. What can I say about them?
BZ: Their sexual life?
TS: Of course. What was interesting about them was that between the four of them they had no sexual life of any description. One was celibate, one was a repressed homosexual, Pattison was unhappily and pointlessly married, Jowett had no sexual interest of any kind. But what was interesting was that they were all obsessed with sex. What is seriously of some interest was that they encountered a "problem" and indeed an author called J.A. Symonds wrote a book called Problem in Greek Ethics. And the "problem" was that in the English school system, the public schools, and in the undergraduate culture, homosexuality was expulsion from paradise. It was a crime, and people were disgraced. At the same time, they were being asked not only to study but to accept as models of everything which was civilized- They were asked to idolize and take as models certain classical writers, who, in certain poems which were less discussed or read than others, seemed to have a completely different ethic, an utterly different sexual ethic in society. It wasn't a matter which got you sent back to your parents in disgrace. On the contrary, it was part of life in the most cultured strata of certain periods in Athens, particularly, and later in Rome. This "problem," it wouldn't go away. Jowett actually used to forgive Plato. Plato couldn't be entirely blamed because he never had the advantage of having been to Balliol. He would have without any trouble transposed these feelings toward some nice young lady. So Housman, our hero, our protagonist, he of course found himself in a world where this was something you had to hide. A few people would flaunt it. I mean, Wilde was a character, and people who once were tempted were actually much better known than Wilde, a rather famous undergraduate as it were. You could make a theater of it. We should keep in mind that Oscar Wilde, who was in advance of his time, did think of it as being some kind of illness he had. What his rebellion was about was, his rebellion was against people who called it, punished it as a crime. But in his letters he still has the mind set that it's some kind of unlucky illness.
BZ: Do you think that happened only after the punishment? That happens, you know in Czechoslovakia, it's very different of course from where you are in Britain, so many people under the communist regime were committed actually after Wilde.
TS: Oh really, well yes.
BZ: I was wondering if he felt that way before he was punished.
TS: He came from a slightly impoverished genteel class of the lower middle class professionals. The unsuccessful doctor/lawyer types. Very, very, very sort of conventional upbringing. Oxford itself must have seemed like an exotic world. What I feel about Housman is that he was rather frightened by the discovery. It was probably a terrifying thing to find in himself and something not to be acknowledged to himself. I called him earlier some sort of a failure. I personally find him heroic. I'm afraid I even like his arrogance at the end, trying to feel with the arrogance as it were, the poison always grows out of something very deep in him. So arrogance wasn't a love of arrogance.
BZ: You actually got at it at the end of the first act, in that monologue. You have it all there. The end will bring it out.
Interview followed by audience Q&A session and an exclusive brunch at Wilma board member Jack Bershad's house.
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