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| Edited By: Pratik Ghosh |Source: DNA |Updated: Jan 21, 2018, 07:30 AM IST
The call from a UK number had come a couple of hours early, though the interview was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. “Pratik?”, the voice at the other end was Tom Stoppard, arguably the greatest living English playwright, who is currently in India to attend the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, the biggest literary event in the country. In an engaging conversation that lasted 20 minutes, Stoppard held forth on several topics, occasionally lapsing into a pause to calibrate his responses, and peppering his words with the famed British humour.
It was illuminating and, in parts, challenging to listen to one of the finest minds whose oeuvre, it has been said, is marked by “verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity”. For Stoppard, who has kept audiences in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic for more than half a century, can choose to not be straightforward, much to the trepidation of an interviewer. The co-winner of the Oscar and Golden Globe for the best original screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, and the Silver Bear ‘for an outstanding single achievement’ for the same film, he has been the recipient of more than a dozen awards, including the Tony Award (thrice), and the PEN Pinter Prize. His debut film — he directed and wrote the screenplay of his popular play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1990. The play, which has at its centre two minor characters from the Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, marked its 50th year on stage in 2017. It was originally written as a one-act play, which was later revised to a two-act script. He was commissioned to write the third act by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which had bought “a one-year option”. The play debuted at the Edinburgh Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the rest, as they say, was history. Stoppard also has an astonishing career writing for radio and television — because all the four mediums “require writers as their basis”, writers who can ensure that the “right words are in the right order”. Edited excerpts:
I was here from the age of four-and-a-half until I was eight-and-a-half. I left in January 1946, I think. I was in Nainital first. I have lots of memories. I am a Czechoslovakian by birth. I was with a group of Czech mothers and children who had come from Singapore. This was during the Second World War. We were Bata people, our fathers worked for the Bata Shoe company. The Bata management were suddenly responsible for this group of mothers and children. I had no idea why we were taken to Nainital. I went to school in Nainital and briefly in Dalhousie, but mainly in Darjeeling. My schooling was mainly in Darjeeling, but before that, I was in Nainital, and very briefly in Dalhousie. My mother, who got bored, asked the Bata people in Calcutta for a job. We landed up in Darjeeling where my mother was the manager of the Bata shoe shop. So, most of my childhood was spent in Darjeeling, where I studied in Mount Hermon School. But the first school I went to in India was in Nainital, a convent.
Well, I had no forethought or foresight of that. As the phrase goes, I was living in the moment and concentrating on trying to make the play work on its own terms. I think that it is probably because I didn’t use Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as talking horses for some secret agenda or philosophy or commentary. I just tried to keep the situations and the narrative alive on their own terms. I think, paradoxically, because the play doesn’t insist on being interpreted from any particular angle to make any particular point, it became a kind of play on which the audience could impose its own view of what the play was saying. What I found quite quickly was that audiences were prepared to enjoy the situation in its own terms, in other words, just enjoy the predicament of the two characters at the Elsinore castle. And at the same time, none of the doors were closed to the audience. The play worked fine for every possible interpretation it might have. And we are talking about 1966-67. The Vietnam war was in the headlines, and once or twice, I remember the audience suggesting a commentary on why we were in Vietnam, which I thought was a bit of a stretch, personally. But, I think that theatre is a storytelling art form before it is a polemical art form, and therefore, I was just worried about the storytelling really. I let it go where it wished to go. This is a very long way of saying that I don’t really know the answer to your question (laughs).
The back and forth between socialism and capitalism has been going on for more than 100 years. I think one’s natural sense of fair play expresses itself politically in a socialistic programme. At the root, human beings don’t change — not in their sense of themselves — and people will always have a response to the perception that life is not being conducted fairly with justice and equality, that is built-in. As a programme, utopian socialism is something that will always be in somebody’s thought of the future. But I don’t think socialist utopia will ever be established, it is too difficult to maintain. But, on the other hand, there is a Hegelian zigzag between opposites. In other words, there is a dialectic between everybody having rights in common on the one hand, and on the other hand, there is a tension or conflict with a tendency that acts against equality — the economic hierarchy. Which, basically means that there will be people who will be richer than others. However, when it comes to Enlightened capitalism, there is always lip-service being paid. The idea of Enlightened capitalism requires quite strong legislations. At the end, progress is being dialectic and trying to arrive at a synthesis.
I think I said that in 1907 or some such period (laughs). I’m sure I have changed a great deal over the years. When I started my career I didn’t think of myself as being some kind of a political writer in disguise. I just thought of it as a recreation, principally. My political positions are sometimes like a pinball in a pinball machine. Over the years I have discovered that I am quite easily persuaded by most positions but the general direction of my thinking is towards a kind of humanitarian, moral society. Political issues dissolve themselves into moral issues. And although I am quite unstable when it comes to expressing things in political language, I feel stable when I observe everything through a prism of morality and ethics. The important questions don’t change at all. Questions like what is justice, it has been a living question for millennia. I’m talking to you from an opulent hotel in Jaipur. I look out the window and I see the economic hierarchy that we all live inside, and I think that responsible citizenship starts from not being blind to what’s out there.
They all require writers as their basis. All the work I have done begins with the written word. These different art forms have much more in common than whatever separates them. I think the work I enjoy doing has very much to do with narrative and storytelling. And that’s something they have in common, which is more important than the surface difference between whether you are listening to voices or looking at a stage or looking at a screen. None of these differences seems to me to be very important. The differences may be technical, but there ought to be the right words in the right order through all these media.
I am the kind of a writer or person who fuels himself by reading. The input is also the written word for me. It doesn’t really have much to do with experiences in the physical world as it has to do with my intellectual life, my mental life. You don’t need too much energy to have a mental life. At this moment, your words, your view of me, gives me pause. I don’t feel at this moment I am doing very much and I am worrying about a creeping inertia and wondering where my next play is coming from. Maybe it’s coming from Jaipur. I’d like to get into a new play while I am in India.
