Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSLis a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 July 1937
CityZlin, Czech Republic
I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years,
I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.
The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.
I don't draw on my inner life in my work.
The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.
I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'