I do not believe in the supernatural but Tom Stoppard almost tipped me over – he was responsible for the greatest coincidence of my life.
In late 2006 I was in charge of Radio 4 and wrote him a letter suggesting he should be the following year’s Reith lecturer. He didn’t do emails. I had never met him – or even spoken to him. Tom had been my favourite living playwright ever since I had been expelled from a school English class for having been a disruptive influence – caused by excessive and apparently antisocial laughing during a group reading of his play The Real Inspector Hound. A few hours after the Reith letter had been posted I picked up an answerphone message:
“I hope you don’t mind this call. I’m Tom Stoppard – a playwright. Perhaps you might have come across my work. No problem if not, but in any event it would be great if you could call me back.”
His call had nothing at all to do with the Reiths. He had not received the invitation. He rang because he had just been sent a copy of a Radio 3 version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, already billed in the Radio Times, and he did not like the cuts. The Radio 3 head honcho was away, he wanted changes, and so he had been told to try his hand with me.
I muttered some mildly obfuscatory cliché about “looking into it” and then charged on to the offensive. I told him that he was about to receive a letter asking him to do the Reiths. A pause. “This is so great an honour that I am simply befuddled. I don’t know what to say. I am aghast. You are so kind.” And then another pause. “But would you mind sorting out my Rosencrantz problem first. Sadly, they have got it all wrong.”
The Radio 3 mess was cleared up easily enough and then he phoned again – and asked what I had in mind for subject matter for the Reiths. I did not wish to confess the extent of my vulgarity – that I would have likely been delirious had he read a bunch of stuff straight out of Hansard. I did say that the choice was very much his but perhaps it might, in some way, any way at all really, relate to his work – hoping that this would be an incentive. “Ah,” he said. “A bit of a target that. And, umm, what do you think my work is about?” Total terror. I thrashed around, spouted something about emotion and the limits of language and waited. “OK, come for breakfast. I’ll cook.”
And so together with the editor of the Reiths I turned up at his penthouse in Chelsea Harbour. He walked towards the fridge to take out a jug of freshly squeezed orange juice and stuck his head inside – back to us and addressing the jug. “I am so sorry. I haven’t had any time to think about it. But maybe I could do something about English theatre since 1945 and its relationship to competing notions of Englishness and national identity. I think I might have become too susceptible to some myths on that score.” And then he came and sat down with us. I was in a swoon. Total euphoria. A scoop, a coup, a triumph.
But it never happened. He wrote an exquisite letter saying that what he most needed to say was contained in the plays and that, on reflection, he was not confident he could do the Reiths justice. I had been defeated. The consolation prize was supper, his cooperation in a season to celebrate his 70th birthday, and then a new piece of writing for Radio 4 – delivered for the standard fee of less than £400 – about Matthew Arnold (On Dover Beach).
That led to another call. His script was a fraction too long. Would I forgive him? So here I was – being asked by this greatest of writers for a 20-second extension. Yes indeed, Tom – you can have an over-run. And I burst out laughing.
A few years later, when I was head of St Peter’s College at Oxford. I proposed him for an honorary degree. This required an essay – so another Stoppard exam – although I thought the reasons for awarding it to him so obvious that it required no more than a list of his work. I passed. The mysterious Oxford process for awarding the big bauble produced the right result.
He came, with Sabrina (whom he later married), for the packed, pleasantly Ruritanian, schedule of events. By the end of the dressing and undressing, the dining and wining, the applause and the speaking, he was getting tired. But we had agreed that after the last big and boozy lunch, and before going back to Dorset, he would meet some English lit students at the college. And he was utterly magnificent. He spoke to everyone individually, listened intently and, without any display of plumage, scattered Stoppardian stardust.
And there you have it. A man with more charm than anyone I have ever met, with the most exquisite manners, who happened to write a string of truly great plays. A supreme liberal for whom freedom of thought was the prerequisite for a decent society. He was my hero.
[Further reading: Tom Stoppard on personal joy and political despair]
Content from our partners
Related
