Travelling companion, party host, dramaturg, elegant texter, heart-throb. Tom was so many different things to me over the years.
I was putting on my first play, Rabbit, at the Old Red Lion pub theatre. He wrote me a cheque for £500 and I asked if he would like to come to our press night, which didn’t seem like a fair exchange. Tom said that he avoided press nights but would come later in our run. I was shocked when he actually did. I summoned all the actors before the show to warn them who was watching that night. Such was the air of event that they thought I was going to tell them we were transferring to the West End. We did, in the end, transfer to the West End, but I was much more nervous about Tom seeing the play.
Our next point of contact was in Moscow. I was writing an article for The Guardian about the Russian production of The Coast of Utopia and I went out to watch some rehearsals. It was a surreal and wonderful trip. Tom had not brought warm enough clothes so we looked for moonboots, ate blinis, and sat in the darkness of the stalls, critically watching the actors pace about. Tom whispered to me “I just keep thinking, if they could be a bit more Russian…like they were in New York.” Tom’s idiosyncratic style of smoking – he took about three drags and then stubbed the long dog-end out in a small portable ashtray, which looked like a tiny spaceship and had a silent sprung mechanism for opening itself up and closing again over the fag. “Yes, it’s almost like it’s got a soul.” Tom ate sweets to fuel himself through rehearsals, and shared them with me and everyone else – emblematic of him.
The Russians flocked to him like he was a religious icon, sitting cross-legged at his feet. One girl looked up at Tom and said “You are… lighthouse to us.” It was typical of Tom that his response was a hopeless “I just feel… very over-estimated.” Privately, he said to me, “They seem to think I’m a cross between Bertrand Russell and Gandhi.” When I wrote my piece, the one edit he requested was that I dropped the word “genius” in describing him.
We kept in touch. He read my second play, Tiger Country, set in the NHS. I confessed that I was repeatedly getting the feedback that it shared territory too closely with TV soaps. He rang me back. “I’ve got an idea for you…but it might be like transplanting a donor kidney…you might reject it.” It was a very Stoppardian solution. I should confront the problem head on, by having a character in the hospital ward who played a character in a TV hospital soap. I took the idea.
Some years later, Tom asked me to adapt his play Hapgood into a film. He explained he did not want to write it himself. Taking “Stoppard’s dialogue” and cutting it, adding to it, felt deeply disrespectful. Not to mention serving the highly complex structure of the play. In the end, with Tom’s encouragement, I became less inhibited. The one change Tom was uncertain about concerned boarding school. There is a strand of plot involving the young son of the main character, the female spy-chief Hapgood. I said that we perhaps, in this era (the play was written in the 80s) might deal a little with maternal guilt, and homesickness in the boy. Tom’s attitude, in the nicest way, was that the boy should just “get on with it”. Tom was sent to boarding school at the age of four.
In between-times, I attended Tom’s legendary summer parties at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Mick Jagger eating a hamburger. Stephen Fry tucking into cheese. Tom would be snatched from one person to the next – he turned to me, gently despairing: “I’m leaving semi-colons all over the lawn.”
When Tom was a still elegant eighty-five, three years ago, he asked me if I would direct a revival of Rock n Roll at Hampstead. Although I was terrified, I said yes. My decision to stage the play in the round (the first Trevor Nunn production had been a classic proscenium arch, with revolve) bewildered him a little, but he allowed me my head. Also in the casting of actors. Having been given so much freedom, I then suddenly realised on the first day of rehearsals that I was nervous. Everyone else had shown their wares to him. The actors in auditions, the set designer with her model box. The nerves in the room were such that I felt I must lead by example, demonstrate with my first question that nothing was too banal or silly to ask the playwright. So I asked him where the main character “Jan” lived in Cambridge. I felt a tremor of surprise, borderline distaste, from Tom. Did we really need to know? Of course not, but it was helpful for Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (playing Jan).
By the next day Tom had embraced these questions and became almost garrulous. He was hilariously humble about certain opacities in his text: “There is something Talmudic about the way I’m looking at my own text… This is typical bloody Tom Stoppard I’m afraid – hopeless. It may be time to pack this in as a career”. He was vivid in his description of the Sappho fragments: “Little scraps of paper like cornflakes.” He loved the extra air-time we gave the gifted Brenock O’Connor, playing Syd Barrett, or Pan, to sing and play.
But in this, the last phase of our relationship, I finally got to see Tom’s steelier side. He wanted the play to work. He ruthlessly cut text in previews. He was clear-sighted about any excesses from the actors and would funnel devastating notes through me. Seeing this lethal side of Tom was the privilege of professional intimacy, only shared with those who were really working with him, not just friends. And yet we were friends too. Numerous times he would go out for a cigarette outside Hampstead theatre and even though I (also addicted to nicotine) would already be chewing on Nicorette, I would smoke one with him while chewing Nicorette.
When it came to the play finally opening to the public, we were shocked that in the first few previews the audiences were totally silent. The actors were tremendous, the pace was fantastic – what was wrong with the audience? We agreed sadly that they were either “quietly appreciative or baffled” but we wouldn’t be happy until they laughed and cried. Thank God, by the third preview, they did. Apparently this is typical of Hampstead preview audiences.
I was too busy to keep a rehearsal room diary, but I looked at my text exchanges with Tom at that time. Pragmatic, occasionally exasperated, solicitous, supportive: “Back of cab thoughts…” (followed by costume ideas) …”Best tech I ever had”… “I’m thinking I should move into a hermitage”… “God I’m fed up with my memory”… “Thank you for supporting the writer”, and hilariously, on hearing aids – “I think they’re much of a muchness according to price range eg a maisonette in Neasden and I think there’s a cartel for pricier Harley street type but if you love your mum why not?” And finally, when we got good reviews, “Sleep well as you ought.”
And I looked back at my Moscow notes. Tom: “We each have our own tiny empire: the family – in which one is engaging in a competition of generosity. We are all capable of saying, come and join my family. So 50 years later you’re dead, and the world is a worse place, but the point is you can think, ‘I made this small number of people happier and they made me happy’.”
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