Hello, I'm Christi Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1985, Roy Plumlee. As the distinguished playwright, Tom Stoppard. Tom, we are dumping you on this desert island in complete isolation. Could you adjust to loneliness? I don't have to adjust in a sense because I like being on my own sometimes and I'm not... Somebody who I think would go mad being alone. What about the constellation of music? How strong would that be?

Music has never really been in the foreground of my life. It's been in the background now and again, often enough for me to be able to think of music I'd like to have with me. Have you any musical skill were you ever put to the piano as a child? No, I... Played the triangle in a percussion band in the main square of Darjeeling in northern India around 1944. You have just eight records to take with you to your tropical island. What's the first? One is Bessie Smith. Blues was the first kind of music which was more than background to me. It's the first music I ever felt. Emotional about. I've chosen careless love, but I could have chosen 40 others. And this is one which has the bonus of Armstrong on cornet. It was done in 1925. And it used to move me to tears and probably will again.

♪ No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ♪ ♪ You lie to my head like wine ♪ ♪ You wreck the life of a minifold gal ♪ ♪ And you let me for this love of mine ♪ - Jesse Smith with Louis Armstrong. Strong careless love. Tom you're Czech by origin aren't you? Yes. Your father was a doctor with one of the Czech shoe companies, the same very big shoe companies in Czechoslovakia. Well, there's one called Barta, which is a worldwide company, but it is a Czech company, and that's quite right. He worked for them as a doctor. Oh, now, you had to get out before...

The Nazi Anschluss. Yes. We got out and we went to Singapore. Why Singapore? I think It was a question of Bartok sending people in different directions, and indeed when we had to leave Singapore, which we did after Pearl Harbor. Once again it was a question of Bartos sending people to different directions and our direction turned out to be India. Child? No, I had an elder brother and I subsequently Half brother and half sister. How much of this do you remember? Do you remember Czechoslovakia? Not at all. My first memories, and they're very slight, are of Singapore. My real memory begins in School in Singapore for a bit. Just. But my first proper school was a convent in India. And I went to various schools in India, ending up at an American.

Multi-national school in Darjeeling. You were being exposed to a lot of cultures very quickly. Czechoslovakia, Singapore, India. American school a little confusing for a small child. Yes, but perhaps... Less confusing to the child since one accepts anything at that age as being one's normal lot. A slight muddle of languages? Finally came to England, which was in 1946. I was under the impression that I spoke the same English as anybody else spoke, but as soon as I got to my prep school, it was quite... That I didn't quite speak the same kind of English. But it was my first language. Nevertheless, I'd stopped speaking Czech as a toddler. I don't even remember speaking Czech. Now, your father had stayed behind in Saint-Germain. In Singapore, that's right. And he was killed during the war. And my mother remarried in India after the war. And then we...

Came to England. And it's through your mother's remarriage, through your stepfather, that you developed the English name of Stoppard. That's right, exactly. Right, prep school, Nottinghamshire. Take to the prep school system? Yes, I mean I've been boarding since I'd gone to school. I mean I was boarding when I was six I think and I... I didn't enjoy either prep school or my subsequent school all that much. There were a lot of things that I did. About both schools which I did like very much but actually I was quite glad to leave school finally. Question of university. No, I wanted to join a newspaper very much. Mind you... I say that though until shortly before I left school I had no idea what I wanted to do, but as soon as the idea of journalism occurred I became really passionate about it. I was very lucky because I managed to get onto the local paper where my parents were living. Where was that? In Bristol. Now you've got a Bristol record, so shall we pause here to play that? Right.

Well, during this period, and I'm now talking about the middle 50s, on Friday nights, I think it was, a band called the Avon Cities Jazz Band used to play in a little kind of high-tech band. House on a hillside somewhere near Bristol as far away as possible from the nearest dwelling and It used to be packed with people on the and there was this lineup which included Jeff Nichols on trumpet and I remember Underneath Ray Bush's clarinet, quite happy that the spittle should be dropping down onto my head. I was so carried away by the lovely noise they made. They made me. One or two records back in those days. And the one I thought I'd have is called Jump for Joy, because after Bessie Smith, which is not the most cheerful. Sound in the world, wonderful though it is. A record called Jump for Joy sounds like a good idea.

Jump for joy.

The Avon City Jazz Band. So, a journalist, Tom, in Bristol. Daily Paper. Yes, the morning paper to begin with. Later I switched to the afternoon paper. Did they make you start on flower shows and be General Dog's body? Definitely the flower shows, also funerals. I graduated to more interesting reporting and I must say I loved all of it, even the shows. You homed in on the theatre. Why? Well, there were two or three good theatres. In Bristol, notably the Old Vic, and one developed friendships with the people who worked there because Bristol, you know, is not a huge place. And one got to know a bit of everything while one was living there. I liked the theatre. I began being sent as a Third Eleven drama critic to amateur theatre and subsequently to the professional theatre. Yes, you're quite right. Some of it rubbed off onto me and I liked the experience. You were also for a while the motoring correspondent.

Very well researched because the while lasted about three or four weeks. Was there any reason for that? The motoring correspondent was ill. I think he turned over a car somewhere. And I was the motoring correspondent. I don't know whether your research has told you that I didn't actually know how to drive at that time. Hardly essential. Well, I would have thought not. Let's have your third record. Well, I'd written my first play. By 1962. It hadn't been done but I'd written it. And I was working as a freelance, and I was the theatre critic in fact, of a magazine called Scene in London. It was quite a show. Court lived magazine and I think it was born and died within a year. S C E N E. S C E N E. And one day one of the chaps who was working for Scene came back from a press conference where he met four new pop singers. And he came back announcing that he'd, as it were, seen the future and it made a very wonderful noise. And he was flourishing a five...

By a glossy print of four young men with pudding based on haircuts wearing... With no collars. Ah yes, yes. And they were kind of disported among upended guitars and tastefully arranged double bass and they were called the Beatlers and their first record... Was called Love Me Do. I've always loved the Beatles and I wanted one Beatle number and I think that I ought to choose Love Me Do which I associate with an interesting time of my life and it was obviously an interesting time of their life too.

Love Me Do by the Beatles. So you were starting to write plays. Yes. In fact, I wrote my... First play in 1960 and I think I had my first thing performed about three or four years later. That was never performed except by students. The first play I wrote was actually called A Walk on the Water, which subsequently became known as Enter a Free Man, and it was done first on television. The vision that was a stage play, it was televised at the end of '63. You were doing quite a lot of bits and... Pieces of radio and television. Well, there was a series on the BBC, I think it was called Just Before Midnight. And it was a series of 15 minute plays, and I wrote two of them. At least I wrote two which were accepted. I suppose that was about... That period, it's hard to remember, about '63. I'd also... Got a job writing a serial for Bush House. I and somebody else took turns...

At the adventures of an Arab medical student in London. And this was a series which was translated by somebody into Arabic and beamed out from Bush House. It never had any existence in the English tongue. You had to think yourself into the life of an Arab medical student. Did you know any Arab medical students? I didn't know any Arabs or medical students actually. Just the adventures of a young man, really. And I used to do five episodes at a time. There were ten minute episodes. I used to sit down on a Friday night, the typewriter, and just sit there until I'd done 50 minutes. Describing your perambulation... About London. As far as I remember it had to have some kind of plot. It was really like the Archers, I suppose. An Arabic Archers. Yes, I mean it had to have a story line. How long do you... Do this? I think about 28, 29 years. I mean, it's seen an awful long time.

You had a wonderful idea to flesh out Shakespeare's intriguing and unscrupulous characters in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Was in '64. In fact, I was in Germany on the Ford Foundation thing where the Ford as it were, imported promising young writers for a few months into Berlin. What for? Well, the idea was that Berlin being cut off from the civilized world had to be kept... Culturally alive and various institutions would pay well-known artists to live there for a year and paint in Berlin rather than in New York. And they also had the scheme where young writers were brought in in small groups. In my year, it was young playwrights. The play by James Saunders came as our tutor. Derek Marlow and Piers Paul Read were among our number. And we lived in a big house on the Vansy Lake, just outside Berlin.

And we didn't learn German, at least in my case. We did some work. And one of the things I did was to start what turned out then to be a short burlesque about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In fact, as far as I remember, it was a play about what happened to them in England after they'd been sent to England. And in my version, the King of England at that time was King I don't have a copy of this piece anymore. Was it written in Shakespearean verse? Some of it was pastiche verse as far as I remember, but then some of it turned into... That kind of modern, Beckettian joke dialogue, which I found interested me more. When I came back to England, I started the whole thing again and wrote a rather different play, which was 'Rosencrantz's Goodenstern are dead and that must have been in '65, '66. Let's have some more music, record number four. This is a record which... Compasses mixed feelings about America, mostly positive.

Encompasses my great liking for the American musical and it also encompasses my liking for deaf. Wit and finally my friendship with Stephen Sondheim who wrote the lyric for this and it's the America The From West Side Story. America from West Side Story, sung by some of the original New York cast. Tom, you had a long battle to sell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Will you re-write...

Well, what happened was that I sent it to the... Shakespeare Company, and they did like it, they were very encouraging about it. They did take an option at one time. They did, yes. As far as I remember, I sent them two acts and they were encouraging and I wrote the third act. But of course they plan a long time ahead and they have to fit things that fit together. And after a while they quite nicely said that it didn't look as if they were going to do it in the foreseeable future. And if I wanted to send it to somebody else, I ought to. and... Agent Kenneth Ewing sent it to Frank Hawser at Oxford, and through him it reached a group of students. Who each year perform the new play at the Edinburgh Festival. And in 1966... They performed my play. You were on the fringe? Yes, it opened in a church hall on Cranston Street one night, and it had its problems, as these things do.

But it got a good notice from the observer, from Ronald Brydon, and because of that, Kenneth Tynan, who was at the National Theatre, asked to read it. And as I said, that was August '66, and it was actually on stage at the Old Vic the following April. Did have an enormous impact and it's still being done all over the world. Yes, that's true. I believe it's a set book which seems a rather daunting thing to happen to any work of art. Yes, it isn't... Feeling. Two or three of my plays have been set books since then, so I've got slightly But at the time it seemed very odd to me because I'd only left school 10 or 12 years earlier. I don't recall having any set books by any people who, you know, had been alive that century. About that time...

While you were waiting for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be staged, you wrote your one and only novel. Yes, that's exactly when I did it, yes. And in fact it was published in the same week as Rosencrantz was performed on the fringe at Edinburgh. So that was a good week. Yes, it was an interesting week. I thought the novel would do rather better than the play, but in fact the novel disappeared almost without trace. I shouldn't say that. It's not really fair to Faber and Faber who gallantly keep it in print, but it's not. A very well-known novel. Rosencrantz and Gilderson were followed by a couple of short players. There's one about the murder of a drama critic. That was the real Inspector Hound. Yes. And I wrote to go with it a play... After Magritte. And then 1972 Jumpers, a play about... A professor of philosophy, a torrent of language, a marvellous performance by Michael Horton.

An enormous success and it's a fairly abstract sort of play, not an easy play. Well, in one sense... Not an easy play, it's a play about a moral philosopher struggling with the idea of God and absolutes of good and evil, but it was written... As a madcap comedy really and it relied quite a lot on its jokes so therefore In another sense it's actually an easy play, it's an entertainment as much as a philosophical discourse. The theatre did it very well. It's a play which requires a few acrobats as well as a few actors. We had quite an impressive sort of production, so it was a sort of, you know, a good time. Let us have record number five. Well, after Jumpers, there was a play called 'Travesties', and one of the nice things about my sort of...

Vestigial musical life is that music gets put into my plays sometimes, notably by Peter Wood who directed Jumpers and Travesties. In the case of Travesties... He had the thought that ragtime music would work very well with a play. Was quite a lot of that in the play. One of the pieces we used was a piece called... The graceful ghost played by William Balcombe, who I think also is the composer of it. And in... Travis's as indeed in one or two other plays there are moments which are great favorites of mine, which I ... something which I can say without conceit because I'm talking about the musical effect. Or the way that music affects what I've written or what is being performed. And there were lovely things in Travis's which were... Very much to do with Peter's choice of music and the way that he introduced and implemented the idea.

This is one of my musical memories. Playing graceful ghost part of the music which was used in Travesties. A play which was almost a musical. Well, I don't know about the almost, actually. Ten years ago I met Andre Previn and he said to me one day, Should you ever write a play which requires a symphony orchestra, I have one. Ha ha ha. Two years to work out how to use this opportunity and the result was a play called

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which is a play with music rather than a musical, because mostly the play... Happens and then there's a music passage and then there's a dialogue passage and so on. And I've chosen some of Andre's music. It's the part which I like most in Every Good Boy, and this is it. Tell me about Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. What is the title? Well, people who have... Had to learn music at school and so on, probably have used every good boy. Deserves favor as a mnemonic for egbdf in america they say every good boy deserves fruit i believe I remember when I was the famous triangularist of the Darjeeling Percussion Band that it was Every Good Boy Deserves Favor. The... The publicist matter of the play is in fact much more serious than that. It's about a political prisoner in Russia who is consigned to a mental institution for his opinions. And among the people in the play is one patient or prisoner.

Whose delusion is that he has an orchestra in which he hears. And... This is the sound that they make. some of Previn's music from Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and he's conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. One of your plays, Tom, doesn't match the rest. A realistic drama about journalism, night and day. Yes. I'm not...

Writer who has masses of good ideas to write about and I have to write about things I know occasionally and one of the things I do know is journalism. I've Fascinated by journalism, not merely as somebody in it, but as somebody outside it. And I think... I taught for years of somehow using that knowledge, and in the end, I wrote a play about-- A war correspondent, at least what Fleet Street calls a fireman sent out to cover a war in Africa. And you're right, it was the most, as it were, realistic play I'd written up to then. It was about a world which I knew better than other worlds I'd written about. And your current play was... Is playing very successfully in London and New York it's been running in London what two years. Thing and I'm delighted that it features a short excerpt from... A desert island disc program. One of the characters in the plays is being interviewed. Yes, that's quite right.

It's really, we're entering into a world of infinite regressors, mirrors facing us. Each other but it's about a playwright who does Desert Island discs and is vaguely ashamed of his taste. It's a little puzzling you are a brilliantly original playwright, but you spend a lot of time adapting old plays by other people. Lorca Schnitzler, currently Molna. Very prolific as an original playwright. I mean I'm doing quite well if I write a full-length stage play every three or four years and they don't take that long to write and I'm always very Pleased to have some good idea offered to me in between. Of course, I also occasionally write a radio play and a very occasionally a television play and people ask me to try and write a film script. But as regards...

Work. I'm very happy about adaptation because I'm very happy to be given plot and characters and to be left To work on the dialogue. They are free adaptations. Well, actually the first one I did was not free, it was Lorca for the House of Bernardo Alba. But at the National Theatre... I've done three. The Schnitzeler, Das Weiterland, which we called Undiscovered Country, was pretty faithful. I was in awe of it. Quite rightly so. Then I did a nestro in 19th century Viennese. About and then more recently what is called the boulevard comedy from the 20s by Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian playwright. Two cases, yes, free adaptation. And in the case of the Monat, very free, because a play which began as a play set-- in a castle in Italy is now set on an ocean liner called the Italian Castle.

We had some more music and we've got to record number seven. On this tropical island, I imagine it as being tropical, I suppose it is tropical. Oh indeed, yes, yes, exactly as on the posters. I had to think of the most English sound one can possibly have and quite quickly got to it. To Vaughan Williams. I should say that although as we've mentioned I didn't get here until I was eight years old, I have an intense empathy for England, landscape of England. Architecture, language. I feel very English. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else and I love England. And I suppose on this island, I would solace or torture myself by having the most... English noise I could think of musically and I settled on the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis and Recorded I'd like is the Neville Mariner one with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

An excerpt from the Vaughan Williams fantasy on a theme of Thomas Tallis. Of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. We've talked about the theatre and radio. When did you last write a television play? In 1977, I'm sorry to say. In 1977? It's longer ago than I would wish. That was a play called... Professional fowl. Which won an award? Yes, it won the BAFTA award and it had Peter Barkwith and other people in it. That was actually a...

Very happy experience rehearsing and working on that play. For one thing it came to me... Quite easily, unusually for me. I remember that although it took ages to get to page 1, which it always does, having... Settled on what it was about. I did it in about two or three weeks. The other thing I wrote it for a fairly elderly leading character and... I'd finished it, I was watching Peter Barkwith in a television play and I thought to myself, God, he's wonderful. I really ought to try and write a play for him one day. And then I thought to myself, Well, why does he have to be that old? And we ended up with Peter Barkwith doing Professional Foul and it couldn't have been done better. Back to the island. How are you going to be able to look after yourself practically? Are you a handyman? Can you build huts? I could do that. They'd fall down after a while. I was in the scouts, come to think of it. Well, splendid then you could light a fire. Yes. Done any fishing? I'm very keen on fishing. Are you? What sort of fishing? Fly fishing. Where? Well, I fish actually.

Near Newbury. I what is called share a rod with Michael Horden. Yes, Michael's very keen. Oh yes, acting is his sideline. Well you have all sorts of qualifications we never knew about. Would you try to escape? No, I think death by... My water is worse than death by sand and sun. Right. Your last record. My last record, it's not a climax actually, it's last because I came across it most recently. Actually I owe it to Peter Wood who was finding music for the real thing. And it's jazz piano. I'm not actually keen on modern jazz. I have to say that I'd never heard of this chap until his music was provided for my play. And this is a piece of his Cologne concert. And the moment I heard it, I loved it. And it's one of the very few pieces that I continue to play for myself occasionally at home.

Keith Jarrett in an excerpt from his Kaleidoscope. Concert. If you could take only one disc of your eight-tone, which would it be? I think I'd take the Bessie Smith actually, because it's... First love, last love, you know. It stood the test of time. Yes. And one book. You already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Something which would somehow occupy me, stretch me intellectually in some way. I thought of a book of chess problems. I could make my own chess set. I thought of a history of mathematics which would genuinely interest me.

In the end I decided I'd like one of those books which has the English text on one page and the translation on another page, or vice versa as it were, because what I thought I'd do is I'd have something like... Dante's Inferno in English and the original, and that way I'd go some way to learn a language. Right. And one... Luxury, one object of no practical use that we'd give you pleasure to have about on the island. Well, when I'm stuck and I have the delusion that a change of activity and scene would unblock me, Tend to go into the garden and kick a plastic football around. Not at random. The idea is to kick it up and down without the ball. Ever touching the ground and I think my record is about 22, you know, from one foot to the other and I'd like a plastic football and probably...

I'd get into the hundreds by the time I'd left the island. Right. And thank you, Tom Stoppard, for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

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