COLUMNISTS 
Sir Tom Stoppard cannot meet me for lunch; he is in the first week of rehearsals for the new London production of his 1993 play Arcadia. The following week, he can’t meet me for lunch because he is not in the rehearsals for the new London production of Arcadia. This makes perfect sense: lunch eats into a writer’s day. One does not achieve Stoppard’s prodigious output by breaking the flow, and at 71 the playwright seems not to be thinking of slowing down.
So, in his courteous way, he suggests instead an early evening dinner, at an Italian restaurant two minutes from the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. When I arrive, early, he is already there, sitting in front of a Campari and soda that he does not drink, casually dressed in muted colours.
The restaurant, it turns out, is a haunt with a story attached. “I started coming here when I was working at the Royal Court” – Stoppard is referring to his last play, Rock and Roll, which is set partly in Prague between the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and which opened at the Chelsea theatre in June 2006.
“One night I smuggled a couple of Czechs in here,” he says; “one of them was an off-stage character in the play – I told the actors I wanted to give them dinner here, and there was this long-haired hippy-ish sort of person and his friend and when I introduced them the actors were amazed, it was as if the play had come to life.
“I’d put them up in a hotel – the Cadogan hotel, where Oscar Wilde was arrested – and the next day the manager called up Jacky [Stoppard’s secretary] to say was it all right about the minibar? The bill was £93. I don’t think they’d seen a minibar before ... ”
He breaks off to ask the waiter for carpaccio with mustard, for him, and asparagus for me; we decide on two glasses of white wine.
“But they were worth it.”
The minibar had turned into a minidrama, in Stoppard’s affectionate telling of the anecdote. He is a relaxed but practised raconteur, quietly funny, and his distinctive rolled rrrrs and slight side-of-the-mouth lisp become more pronounced. His sense of playfulness in planning the surprise apparition of a “character” went hand in hand – I sensed – with a sort of amused admiration for the wilder side of his fellow countrymen.
For Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, two years before his family fled the coming Nazis. Singapore was their first refuge, then he and his mother and brother boarded a ship bound for Australia that was diverted to India. Later, when his father followed, his ship was fatally bombed by the Japanese. In 1945 his mother re-married, and Major Kenneth Stoppard gave his stepson a new name, a new nationality and a new home in England. “I became a kind of England supporter,” he once said, “but instead of it being football, it was the nation ... ”
His early success, which came in 1967 with his first play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, celebrated English culture by its very title – a brilliantly cheeky way for a young playwriting talent to announce himself. But he has increasingly delved into eastern European culture, especially when investigating exiled Russian thinkers in his trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), and in Rock and Roll positing a hero called Jan who spent his wartime childhood in England but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948 – a sort of what-if alternative version of Stoppard’s own life. The play set up a complex series of contrasts between the two societies, between two systems of thought; a dialogue that becomes a sort of onstage version of Stoppard’s work for freedom of speech – he is a stalwart supporter of Amnesty International and PEN – and for human rights in post-communist regimes.
His career of more than four decades covers film scripts, television, radio plays, translations and versions, as well as some 24 original plays. The latest is his version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which is about to come to London’s Old Vic as part of the Bridge Project, a three-year British-American collaboration under the wing of director Sam Mendes, Old Vic artistic director Kevin Spacey in London, and Joseph V. Melillo, artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). With casts of both British and American actors – this year’s company includes Simon Russell Beale, Ethan Hawke, Sinéad Cusack, Rebecca Hall – The Cherry Orchard and its sister production The Winter’s Tale, launched at BAM in January to excellent reviews and have since played in Singapore, Madrid and Recklingshausen in Germany.
Stoppard’s versions of Chekhov have become well-established – he has already “done” The Seagull and Ivanov – but before I can find a polite way of asking why the world needs another Cherry Orchard, even from him, he anticipates the question.
“One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date, in a way that the original doesn’t, translations seem to be of their time.”
For this latest Stoppard-Chekhov collaboration, he says he did “hardly anything” to the play. “I couldn’t approach Cherry Orchard in same spirit as Ivanov – that’s not an untouchable masterpiece, which Cherry Orchard pretty much is. They [the four great Chekhovs] do seem to be bottomless plays – you can examine a scene for ever.
“Translation is almost an oxymoron – when I hear translations of my own plays I don’t have to know the other language to be absolutely certain that you can’t do what the English does a lot of the time – not just because of the obvious things like wordplay, but because a lot of writing in any language is a kind of collusion between sound and sense, and you can’t get the sound by inserting an equivalent sense. Furthermore, when you’re writing, without even thinking about it, you’re pulling into service innumerable allusions to life as it is understood by your audience, a kind of cultural context...”
Unseen by Stoppard, who speaks quietly if intensely, the waiter has been listening for some minutes to this brilliant riff on the writer’s and translator’s art, with a slightly stunned look on his face. Apologetically, he breaks in to ask us whether we want our sea bass on or off the bone. Off, is the answer.
“I only mention that,” Stoppard continues, not meaning the sea bass, “because I’ve always been very pragmatic about the theatre. I don’t see the point of avoiding the bedrock reality that you’ve got a few hundred people listening and watching and being critical of what they’re listening to, and watching. They haven’t come to do you any favours. There may be passionate protective Chekhovians who have come for the unmediated, undiluted true word, but I don’t feel like that at all – theatre is a mediated art form, it has a storyteller, or several. The text loses its virginity simply by being staged, it’s no longer the abstract ideal version, it’s an event.”
And does he find the same with his own work – now that he is once again working on Arcadia, after 16 years – does he feel the need for revisions?
“Not at all. With one’s own work, you kind of get to where you want to be, and it doesn’t go bad on you. Certainly there are all kinds of places where I don’t much like what I’ve done, but it’s not because there’s a better version, I just can’t improve it. Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I’d had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.”
This sounds like an unusually generous impulse, from a writer.
“Just pragmatic – if it works, it’s good.”
Pragmatically, we settle down to the serious business of fish, mash and zucchini, and as we munch Stoppard seems to intuit my next question: why it has taken 16 years to bring Arcadia – which many consider his masterpiece – back to the London stage?
“It’s my fault, if that’s the word – thought it was too soon, until now. Sonia Friedman [the producer] asked me a while ago if she could do Arcadia, but I thought it was too soon, it was only 11 years.”
This is one of the few times Stoppard has sounded a little defensive. Only 11 years, for a play that has become one of his most celebrated, and which many of his younger fans have never had a chance to see?
“Well, I like the thought that the babies born on the opening night are now old enough to go to the play and get it ... ”
The thought of these “Arcadia children” (though it’s perhaps a skittish ruse for getting round my question) brings us to his actor son. Ed Stoppard is the youngest of his four sons – his mother is Dr Miriam Stoppard, the playwright’s second wife – and takes the part of Valentine Coverley in the new Arcadia. Does this cause any difficulties?
“He was such an obvious person to be on the shortlist for the role” – Ed already has a well-received Hamlet among his other West End credits – “but at first I thought, ‘Perhaps he shouldn’t’, then I thought, ‘The hell with it, he shouldn’t be penalised for carrying my name.’ I stayed away from his auditions, of course – but now I’m rehearsing with him I don’t even think of him as being my Ed, he’s just another actor. And he’s got three little girls, so I’m just glad he’s got a job.”
As with David Leveaux, director of the new production of Arcadia, who also worked on the London and Broadway revivals of The Real Thing and Jumpers, Stoppard says: “He’s very gifted, and anyway he is a very congenial colleague – and I identify with what Evelyn Waugh said about world war II: ‘it’s better to spend it among friends’.”
As if two big London openings in one month aren’t enough, Stoppard is also working on a new television series, an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, and there’s a Japanese version of Coast of Utopia in the offing, and much else. He is planning a trip to Japan (“I’ve only been there once, when we were making Empire of the Sun [for which Stoppard wrote the screenplay] – it was only a two-hour stopover, so I just went to Issey Miyake”). This time he plans to travel by rail overland from Moscow.
“So that’ll be 12 months of being away from home a huge amount, and” – suddenly very intense now, and yet again anticipating the next question – “it’s got to stop, Jan, because I’ve got to write a play. Thing is, I haven’t got an idea for a play. Part of the problem is that there are all these vast subjects thrusting themselves at anybody who presumes to deal with – I don’t, but perhaps it’s time I did – to deal with big contemporary issues. So you think, ‘right, should I do climate change, or should I do torture, or Afghanistan ... ?’”
This does not sound like the playwright once quoted as saying he wanted his work to be “entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness” – but that was before his involvement in human rights became more intense, with visits to eastern Europe and a growing friendship with Vaclav Havel.
“It’s not really obligation, but I do feel a desire to [tackle this sort of subject] – one of the interesting issues of the last two or three years has been the privacy law, for example. But for that kind of play I amass a lot of reading research, of which I use about five per cent – it’s very inefficient. So there’s an equal but very different attraction, which is to write a play that has nothing to do with anything except itself, it’s just about this family, this woman, something.
“I have no sense of any of these things at the moment, but I’m getting to feel delinquent – for a couple of years after you’ve opened a new play you feel you’ve paid your dues and done what you’re supposed to do, and it takes another couple of years before a different feeling takes over – where you feel you should be doing a play and that’s that. And maybe I’ll be in that position by the end of the summer.”
The restaurant is getting very noisy now, and I recognise the subtle signs of a man who is dreaming of a cigarette. We chat for a few more minutes before he suddenly says; “Walkies?”
We stroll through the twilight towards Sloane Square, Stoppard happily puffing on his cigarette and, as if out of some homing instinct, he heads for the Royal Court and parks himself happily on the concrete step, a place where he must have smoked many, many thoughtful cigarettes; he is as relaxed as if he were in his own sitting room. And we talk about how Jacky is currently trying to find out whether smoking is allowed on the Trans-Siberian Express.
‘The Cherry Orchard’ opens on May 23 at the Old Vic, London. www.oldvictheatre.com
‘Arcadia’ opens on May 27 at Duke of York’s Theatre, London. www.dukeofyorkstheatre.co.uk
Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editor
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Caraffini
61-63 Lower Sloane Street, London SW1
Campari & soda £3.55
Carpaccio di manzo £9.05
Asparagus with Parma ham £10.50
Sea bass x 2 £34.50
Purée of potatoes £2.65
Zucchini £2.65
Glass of Pinot Grigio x 2 £11.00
Mint tea £1.95
Cappuccino £1.95
Total £77.80
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Gained in translation
It is a truism that the English regard Chekhov almost as one of their own, such is his popularity on the English stage. But Chekhov inconveniently wrote his originals in Russian and when we want to eavesdrop on Olga, Masha and Irina, we are in the hands of translators, writes Sarah Hemming.
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| The Cherry Orchard |
But do we need so many? How much variation can writers find in one text? When Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, staged his recent production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, in a new translation by Stoppard, he argued that every age needed a fresh look at the great classics.
“You need to have an engagement with writers all the time,” he said. “I like the idea of constantly commissioning new versions of things. People say, ‘What’s wrong with the versions that exist?’, but I’ve always thought a version is written for the time it’s written in. There are really few exceptions to that.”
Some writers work from literal translations, others, such as Frayn, understand the Russian. For each, the task is a balancing act between accuracy and accessibility. Frayn, introducing his Uncle Vanya, explains why he changes Vanya’s exclamation after he has fired his gun twice and missed both times from the more usual (and perhaps funnier) “Missed again!” to “Another failure?”, suggesting that the Russian original has broader implications. Audiences might not notice such details but they would surely notice awkward outdated colloquialisms, such as Lopakhin in Henry S Taylor’s 1964 The Cherry Orchard referring to himself as “a young shaver of 15”.
Some translations are deliberately free, such as Janet Suzman’s South African-inflected Cherry Orchard, or Diane Samuels and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s Three Sisters on Hope Street (which relocated the frustrated sisters to postwar Liverpool). But more often it is just a case of bringing a fresh pair of ears to the dialogue, rediscovering the original anew. Does Olga in Three Sisters say, “I should have liked a husband” (Frayn) or “I’d have loved my husband” (Stephen Mulrine)? Perhaps both are true – that’s the genius of the man.
