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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.
But then there was Stoppard the writer for radio – the medium that was in many ways his first love. Some of his earliest work, back in the 1960s, was for radio. He was still adapting plays for radio as recently as 2020.
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.
Verbal dexterity was always a Stoppard hallmark, but there was much more to his radio-friendliness than that. In her 2020 biography, Hermione Lee wrote that Stoppard “made brilliant use of the medium. He loved the freedom it gave him”. He’d come up with directions such as “the sound of someone clutching a pair of red-hot forceps while being kicked by a donkey as a vacuum cleaner starts up and a roomful of clocks strike the hour”.
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.
“I was taking part in an amateur university production. It was seen by a total of about 30 people in the entire three weeks! Meanwhile, Tom’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was also playing at the festival and was this incredible success. We became friendly and stayed friendly throughout the years.”
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.”
The director of that radio version of Rock ’n’ Roll was Alison Hindell, now the BBC’s head of audio drama. In an interview at the time of Stoppard’s death, she told me that in her dealings with him over the production she’d found the playwright to be “a gentleman who was always courteous and interested in what you had to say – always ready to have a proper conversation about what we were trying to do. It never felt like a relationship of unequals.”
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.”
That included a play Stoppard had come across that he liked called The Voyage of the St Louis, German playwright Daniel Kehlmann’s work based on a true story from 1939 about an ocean liner that leaves Germany for Cuba with 900 Jewish passengers on board, all of them hoping to escape persecution.
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”.
Rock ’n’ Roll (Easter Day 7.15pm) and The Voyage of the St Louis (Easter Monday 8.30pm) are two of the works Radio 4 is re-broadcasting during its three-day Stoppard festival. Others include a radio version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Saturday 3pm, 4pm); another 1960s-era work, Albert’s Bridge (Easter Day 3pm); and the 2013 radio play Darkside (Saturday 9pm), in which Stoppard honoured the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon on its 40th anniversary.
As a young playwright, Stoppard found a true home in radio. He never really left it.
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