With a work about to première in Ireland, the playwright tells Karen Fricker about artifice and originality in his writing.
Something rather unusual is happening: Tom Stoppard is lost for words. Asked whether the views of love expressed by the lead character, Henry, in his 1982 play The Real Thing match his own, Stoppard's legendary verbal abilities seem to run aground. "The things Henry is talking about, that shyness and inability . . . the way that things seem to oneself to be . . . Oh, God. I haven't got my head together today."
Is this really going on? Is life becoming the dark underbelly of a Tom Stoppard play? Is one of the greatest wordsmiths in the English language, trying to explain where he fits in a play that's all about the slim distance between reality and theatre, actually disappearing into the gap? Ah, no. As soon as he falls off the linguistic horse Stoppard is back astride and attacking the fence again with gusto. "The shyness and inability which Henry ascribes to himself, I ascribe to myself too: the sense that deeply felt things can seem very banal when they are uttered. I saw that as being a kind of hurdle one had to get over in writing The Real Thing. It's a self-referential play in that way."
Is it ever. Stoppard is, of course, a writer hugely celebrated for the way his plays riff off other works of literature: he became famous in 1966 with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe première of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which promotes two incidental characters from Hamlet to central status in a dramatic situation that equally refers to the existential anxiety of Waiting for Godot. His 1975 play Travesties is, well, a travesty of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest peopled with fictionalised versions of real figures, including James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin. But The Real Thing was the first play in which Stoppard created a fictional central character who was a playwright and who grapples with the difficulties of both writing about love and of loving.
The Real Thing rewards attentiveness from its viewers; what seems real within it is always shifting for characters and audience alike. "It's a kind of a Rubik's cube," says Paul Meade, who is directing the Irish première of the play for Gúna Nua Theatre Company. "You fix one side and then you realise there are so many other sides. He's created an amazing puzzle but one that isn't sailing over the audience's head. I don't think it's cleverness for the sake of it. He's trying to puzzle something out himself: he's asking difficult, adult questions about relationships, and love, and the place of sex within love."
What makes the play much more than an intellectual exercise is the emotional journey that Henry takes within it. When we first meet him he's having an affair with a married actress, Annie; as their relationship develops he is forced to confront the experience of devotion, betrayal and loss that he previously had written about with a certain arrogant detachment.
Stoppard baulks, however, at the suggestion that the ability to feel "real" love becomes available to Henry only in the play's final acts. "It's the real thing right through the play. Relationships can take different paths, but just because they aren't tidy and coherent and consistent doesn't mean they're not real. The real thing isn't real because love runs smoothly: it's real because it doesn't."
The Real Thing was first produced at the Strand Theatre in London in November 1982, starring Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal. (In a well-known real-life twist bogglingly in keeping the play's Chinese-boxes themes, Stoppard started an affair with Kendal during the production that ended his marriage.) A Broadway production starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close followed in 1984, which won numerous Tony Awards, including those for best actress, actor, director and play. It was revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1999 with Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle in the leading roles; that production subsequently transferred to the West End and to Broadway, where it again picked up a slew of Tonys.
Stoppard's screenwriting CV is almost as long as that for his plays, and he is internationally best known as one of the screenwriters of the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love, for which he won an Academy Award with Marc Norman. He is surprisingly forthright, though, when asked if the way he depicts screenwriting in The Real Thing - Henry writes cheesy science-fiction films to meet his alimony payments - echoes his own attitudes. "I've never written an original film in my life," he says breezily.
"The films are not mine in the same way the plays are mine. I've been fortunate in the things I've been asked to do - an adaptation of a J. G. Ballard novel [Empire Of The Sun\], for example - but I don't consider myself to be the author of those films. It's a different hat."
Meade and David Parnell, the artistic directors of Gúna Nua, first came to The Real Thing by reading reviews of its Donmar Warehouse revival. "It sounded like our kind of play," says Meade. "And then, once we'd read it, we liked that it was about contemporary concerns and that it had a naturalistic feel but went beyond naturalism. And this concern with love and relationships . . . we're suckers for love stories."
By coincidence I am talking to Meade about Stoppard's play only hours after he's been awarded this year's Stewart Parker New Playwright's Bursary for Skin Deep, Gúna Nua's last play, which he wrote and Parnell directed. "It's fascinating," he says. "I am so wrapped up in directing at the moment that I haven't been thinking much about being a writer. But when you look at Henry's life I know what Stoppard is talking about. He talks about the insularity of love, but only a writer would say that. Only a great writer. That has resonances for the loneliness of being a writer, the insularity of the writer's life. He's not whingeing about that, but it's there."
It seems Stoppard himself is feeling a bit of writerly vulnerability at the moment. While occupied with numerous projects - a new version of Pirandello's Henry IV, opening at the Donmar on April 29th, the Broadway transfer of the Royal National Theatre revival of his 1972 play Jumpers and a number of film scripts, including adaptations of Philip Pullman's celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy - what he's decidedly not working on is a new original play.
"I don't have an idea, and I wish I did. After The Coast Of Utopia [his trilogy of plays about the Russian Revolution for the Royal National Theatre in 2002\], I was very tired. I did a film and I did some translations. But I would like to write a play." Yet another surprisingly open sentiment from a writer one associates with the quick quip. He's sure to know that this kind of personal disclosure is a gift to an interviewer: he started out as a journalist and critic himself.
Or perhaps this is candour that comes from confidence and maturity: after more than 40 years as a playwright what's the point of doing anything but tell the truth? Was I talking to the real Tom Stoppard? How exciting not to know.
The Real Thing opens at Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday