It was understandable that the obituaries and tributes that followed the death of Sir Tom Stoppard last November focused almost entirely on his work for stage and screen. After all, this was the man who conquered the West End, Broadway and beyond with plays like Travesties, Arcadia and The Real Thing, and whose acclaimed screenplays included the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love.
By way of tribute to a figure many regard as the greatest English dramatist of the past 60 years, Radio 4 has dug deep into its archive to assemble a dazzling array of Stoppard works to air over the Easter weekend. Among other related programmes, there’s an Archive on 4 (Saturday 8pm) that tells the playwright’s life story through his own words.
What was it like to perform Stoppard on the radio? The eminent actor Bill Paterson was cast in a 2007 radio adaptation of Rock ’n’ Roll, the play in which Stoppard most extensively tackled the political upheavals of his native Czechoslovakia. “I loved doing it,” Paterson recalls. “The writing was fantastically energetic. Tom came to rehearsals and was terrific company. It’s not often you do a radio play and find yourself alongside such a true great. It seemed to me that he was especially at ease with a radio production because there’s nothing to concentrate on except the words.”
There was another reason why acting in a Stoppard play – which he had never done in his career up to that point – was special for Paterson. “I’d known Tom going right back to 1966. We met when we both found ourselves living under the same roof during the Edinburgh Fringe – basically a condemned tenement building that a bunch of people were renting, and I’d pass this very striking-looking chap on the stairs. It turned out to be Tom Stoppard.
Paterson sees Stoppard as “this muscular intellectual, always questing”, and he felt there was a lot of the playwright’s personality in the character he played in Rock ’n’ Roll, the academic Max. “Max is politically completely torn, and you could see that this was an argument that Tom had going on in his head all his life.”
Stoppard told Hindell that her radio version of Rock ’n’ Roll was his favourite production of the work, and he kept in touch. “Tom was a great ally,” Hindell said. “Any news about cuts to BBC radio drama and he would be very concerned. He would rally the troops. Every now and then he would drop me a line about something he’d heard.”
Hindell persuaded Stoppard to do the adaptation, and the production aired in 2020 – Stoppard’s last new BBC radio credit. “He was very modest when I asked him, but then he agreed and of course he did it superlatively. He focused the play right down and found humour in the characters so that they became fully realised.” Hindell identified an aspect of Stoppard’s genius that had always struck her – “that although there are always lots of words in a Stoppard play, they never feel overwritten”.
As a young playwright, Stoppard found a true home in radio. He never really left it.
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