 Happy Friday evening everyone, welcome to the first Royal Society of Literature and British Library event of 2021 and my first as chair of the RSL. Becoming chair of the RSL is the greatest professional honour of my life. I look forward to continuing our work in celebrating the diversity and wealth of classic and contemporary literature. Literature continues to find new readers and new authors from under-represented backgrounds. The RSL has an important role in all of this, in safeguarding and broadening literature's contribution to our lives. We're pleased that so many of you could be here this evening and we're grateful that you continue to support great writing in these challenging times. There will be a Q&A to round up the evening and you'll find the chat function by scrolling down on your browser. Since we cannot see you it will be lovely to hear from you, so do send in your comments and questions. That way we can keep our two RSL Fellows, Mark Lawson and Hermione Lee, on their toes as they discuss Hermione's biography of Tom Stoppard. I'm going to briefly introduce Mark before he introduces Hermione. Mark Lawson was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015. I'm sure we're all familiar with his important contribution to the arts on television, radio and in print. He has interviewed just about every major contemporary literary figure. Mark is also a novelist and dramatist and his works have featured fictionalised accounts of historical figures such as, I'm going to do a little list here, Margaret Thatcher, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Harold McMillan, and if that wasn't enough, Graham Green and a bit of Evelyn Wall mixed in there. What a list, Mark. Well done. And on a personal note, I've had the pleasure of working with Mark on several occasions and I've always been struck by his kindness and curiosity and his open-minded approach to the arts, so I can think of no finer person to interview Hermione about her biography. Over now to Mark Lawson. Mark Lawson, do you receive me? I do. It is like the Mars landing isn't it this morning and equally successful we hope. Thank you very much, Daljeet. Congratulations on becoming chair. An excellent choice. Thank you for those kind words. And yes, I will be talking to Dame Hermione Lee about Tom Stoppard alive, her extraordinary, magnificent biography of our greatest living playwright. We would probably agree. As Daljeet said, I'll talk to Hermione for a while from our different studies. We have to get all these books rushed in to make us both look literary. And then there'll be questions from you, which I'll be able to read out. We welcome most questions. The only one because it's obviously tempting and I was going to ask it is who Hermione might like to go on to write biographies about, but she's keeping that very quiet for the moment. So it would be a wasted question from me or from you. It isn't Boris Johnson. It isn't Donald Trump. And she's not going to tell us tonight. However, we will discuss in some detail her life of Tom Stoppard, in which she follows his work from a work that even the most dedicated Stoppardians may only be slightly familiar with, which was a walk on the water, a TV play he wrote in 1963, which later became a stage play enter a free man, right up to Leopold Statt in 2020, which anyone who walks around the London West End on their daily permitted active exercise will notice the poignancy right through the West End, but particularly when you go past the theatre and you see Leopold Statt effectively suspended waiting for the return of theatre, but the producers are determined that they will return and anyone who's seen it or had tickets or read about it will look forward to that. So welcome to Dame Hermione Lee. And where I thought I'd like to start, Hermione, it seemed to me that almost in the way that divers have degrees of difficulty if you dive in the Olympics, you've worked through it through your biographies across really all of the different dilemmas and difficulties. So you've written about the American writers, Willard Cather, Anita Swarton, Virginia Woolf, a great English figure where they had been dead for some decades. Then you wrote about Natalie Fitzgerald, who had died relatively recently and had living relatives. So you have to negotiate that issue. And now for the first time with Tom Stoppard, you've dealt with the living subject. So I thought we'd start there with the different challenges presented by those subjects and whether you have deliberately set yourself different challenges. Thank you. The first thing I want to say is it's extremely nice to be talking to you since actually you are the world's greatest living expert on Tom Stoppard as we are rapidly going to discover. Yes, of course, the question of the safely dead subject and the living subject is one that's been very much on my mind. And when Stoppard asked me to do this book in the end of 2013, of course, it was an amazing adventure and challenge to be asked. And I, you know, nobody would have said no. But I did think this could be very problematic. Actually, because he's a generous and professional person, it wasn't as problematic as it might have been. I, Beckett famously said to his biographer, I will neither help nor hinder. And Stoppard didn't hinder, but he did also help. So he promised, for instance, to make materials available to me. So what the biographer of a living subject has, if the subject is willing, is access to that subject, which took the form of long conversations, sometimes over several days, over a period of years in which there were no, there was nothing barred. I mean, there were things he was, you know, obviously, would be bored with answering and things that fired him up. Like when I asked him what he was wearing in the 1970s. Amazing riffs about ruffles and shoes and so on. So quite unexpected moments in these conversations. You have access to the materials that the person is willing to show you, as well as what is a considerable archive for him in the Harry Ransom Centre in the Texas Wets All Perfectly Catalog. There are many, many versions of the plays, and you can see the draft that is, of course, fascinating in itself. So one of the things I was able to see, which I probably wouldn't have been able to see if he'd not been with us, are the letters that he wrote to his mother from about 1948 till he died in 1996. He wrote to a letter every week, whether or not they had phone calls. And these letters are a kind of diary of what he's doing. He clearly doesn't want her to feel out of touch with him. And although he doesn't tell her everything, he's writing to his mother. It's an astonishing entry point into his life. They were all pretty much all undated. So I had to date them before I could use them. But that was a remarkable thing. The other thing, of course, is you get to talk to a lot of people who know him. And this is a person who knows a million people. So I had to take a sort of representative slice in the theatre and media and the tree world of people who know him and also family and friends and so on. That raises the problem of the living person, which is that although people want to help you because because of him, they want to help you because they want to do well by him. They are also extremely aware that he's probably going to be reading what they are saying about him, if I put it in the book. And so I think I had to be aware that I had to have a pinch of salt with me. And I also remember when Tom Stopper received the David Kern Prize. I was chair of the judges and he he said he was he felt slightly miffed, one of his favorite words, I think, that it was a lifetime achievement award and he was still living his life. I mean, that that would apply even more to a biographer because, you know, famously the we take the meaning of a work of art. I mean, fiction fiction drama from its ending. And yes, a story that hasn't got an ending. Yes. Well, luckily, I like unfinished pictures and there's a line in Indian ink where the poet says to the painter, you know, unfinished pictures are the best because they still because they have life in them. So I like the idea anyway of biography, which leaves gaps and silences and mysteries and unsolved problems because that's what life is. And that's how you know other people with him. It's this business about lifetime's achievement and being honored and all the rest of it and being put in various kinds of boxes is all the more acute for the biographer because he's been very rude about biography, not him personally, but his characters in a lot of the plays. And there's a wonderful moment in Indian ink where the old lady says the would be biographer or biographies, the worst excuse for getting people wrong. And I did I was on a I've done a few public interviews with with Stockard over the last few years. And we were on a form together at the 92nd Street Y in New York. And I like you, I have my questions ready. And I I I'd asked the first question and he turned the order and says, before I answer this question, you know, the author who says biography adds a new terror to death. Well, here she is. And then we went on from there. So there is a slight edge to the whole process of being biographed. And my feeling is that this time went on because it takes a long time to write the book. I think he got more used to the idea that he had a biographer. You talked about which I totally accept and understand the people talking about him worrying about him reading it. You had a much greater problem, which is the first the first time in your biographical career, you had the subject. Really, I mean, that must have been a nerve racking moment when you send it off. Well, he he we sat side by side for several hours while he went through this large type script, having marked it up copiously with yellow post-it notes. And it was somewhat taxing because I didn't quite know what was going to happen. What struck me about it was that she was very philosophical about the whole thing and things that I thought he might walk at he didn't. So just to give you an example, there's a very touching, very early romantic love relationship with a girl in Bristol. And he wrote some pretty soppy poems and letters when he was in his E Cummings phase, so there aren't any capital letters in these letters. I think they're very sweet and touching and he's 18 years old or 19 years old. And I thought he might think this is too embarrassing for words, and I think he decided just that it's part of the story. What the only thing he asked me to take out was a reference to an actor who had been sacked from a revival of one of his plays. And he he didn't ask me to take the fact out. He said, you have to name him. And I thought that was I was impressed by that. I thought that was generous and admirable, actually, that that was the one thing he asked me to censor. And to give us a sense, I'm going to tell a little story now about the level of your research a couple of years ago. I took a little parcel into a post office in London. And for security reasons, they now ask you what's in it. And they're very impressed because Hermione people know has a wide variety of titles and I tend to use all of them. So I've written I've written on the package. Dame Professor, President Hermione, Hermione Lee, FRSL, all the rest of it. And that's why they never reach me. Oh, and they and the person in the post office looked at it, the assistant and obviously thought it must contain the crown jewels or state secrets or something, because this person is so elevated. So they said, can I ask you what's in it? And I said, yes, I said, yes, there's a DVD of an obscure English sex comedy called Don't Just Lie There, Say Something. That's right. There's a play text of No Sex, Please Were British. Yes. Can I explain that to the audience before they get the wrong idea? So you are not only the world's greatest living expert on Tom Stoppard amongst a few others, but you're also the world's greatest living expert on the history of the Whitehall Fasts in English theatre. And this wasn't one of my forte when I started the book, but there is a very funny, rather silly play by Stoppard called Dirty Linen, which is actually about press freedom. And it's about whether the obnoxiousness of a free press is worth the candle. And this is actually a subject that he's returned to in more serious form in, for instance, a play called Night and Day. But I was doing my homework because I wanted to set it in his context of the sort of Brian Ricks type play, which he had obviously looked at and thought these plays make a lot of money. These plays are very successful, these Whitehall Fasts. And so he was doing a sort of spoof. And the joke for him was to set a Whitehall Fast in Whitehall. But also for the books, Mark. Yeah, but financially it worked because it ran for years, didn't it? Yes, indeed. There was a point where he had something like four plays running in London at the same time. I mean, he's often had that thing of having two plays on at different theatres or two plays on at the Lincoln Centre at the same time. He is astonishingly successful in a way, in a sort of way that no other playwright of his time quite has been, I think, in becoming a kind of household film. I think Inter is the only equivalent, really. But the reason I mentioned those sources for a couple of reasons. One is that which you cover very strongly in the book. He isn't a literary or theatrical snob at all. I mean, he there's also one of the I think one of the great, greatest one act plays, which is The Rid and Spectre Hound, which is a parody of Agatha Christie. So when Rid and Spectre Hound was on and when Dirty Linden was on, he has parodies of two Western forms going on at the same time. And he is, but also the other thing, which you also cover is and he said this himself. He self deprecatingly says he can't think of plots. Almost all the works have another text behind them, most famously in the importance of being earnest behind Travesty's and so on. Hamlet. Yeah, yeah. Yes, but there are a couple of things there, Mark, that are very interesting. It's true that he often uses another story or the story of Joyce and Zara and Lenin all together in in chess at that time, or he or the story of the Russian revolutionaries in terms of utopia. He is provoked and inspired by other stories. Yes. And I forgot what we were talking about before, because you went on to that. You had another question. It's about him not being. Oh, yes, the popular. Yeah, sure. That's a really, that's a really important point to me, because that's a wonderful moment where he says he's gone on Call My Bluff with Miriam Stopcock, his then wife, and he says, I'm sure Samuel Beckett never went on Call My Bluff. And you can see he likes things like the Monty Python show and he likes things like Just A Minute, More Common Wise, all those comedies. He likes rock music and rock music has been incredibly important to him. He doesn't particularly like opera. So in some ways he loves popular culture, but in other ways, of course, this is someone who is thinking extremely hard about Wittgenstein or about Greek poetry or about quantum physics or about consciousness theory. So what you've got very unusually are plays made up of a remarkable stretch of knowledge and curiosity and interest. And I think if you were to ask me, what are the key things that make him so great and so important and the word important is a bit stuffy, but so meaningful to people? Is this mixture of language, knowledge and feeling? I think it's those three things in gear together which make him so remarkable. Now the feeling thing I was gonna pick up on that because there is a critical libel which is still pursued by a couple of critics actually, which is that his plays are all brain and no heart. There is no feeling. I've always found that astonishing because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Dead is the key word in that title about death and despair and you feel it in good productions but he's always suffered from that every so often and sometimes the same critic would announce finally Mr. Stoppard has shown us his heart. Yes, it keeps on happening, doesn't it? You'll recognise it in waves of criticism. People thought that Rosencrantz and jumpers and travesties was just all hijinks and fizz and dazzlingness and then they thought with the real thing. Oh, he's finally found a heart. And then again with Arcadia, you know, 10 years on you get the same kind of thing. And even now with Liverpool stuff, you've got a few critics saying, oh, good heavens, Mr. Stoppard is a serious and moving playwright, but you're quite right. You're quite right about that. There's a playwright he very much liked and knew called James Saunders, who I think is not very well known now. Next time I'll sing to you. There was a play called Next Time I'll Sing To You which had a great, which was kind of surreal, odd post-modernist play and it has a line in it. There lies behind everything a certain quality which we may call grief. And it's very extraordinary to see that line coming through Stoppard's life because there was a television program he made a sort of spoof documentary about himself in 1972 called Tom Stoppard Doesn't Know. And it was about not being able to make up your mind on every question of the day. And it was about moving around in uncertainties and not making your mind up and having sort of negative capabilities as it were as a writer. And you still see that coming through in someone like the character of Tugania in post-Eutopia where Tugania has it were prized himself on taking every possible point of view. Now, Stoppard is a man with strong principles and morality, but he's still, he's a playwright. So he's able to speak in different voices so he can do with different people. But that line about grief underlying everything, that line from James Saunders comes into that early television program. And then I heard him quoted again as a lecturer in Oxford about five years ago. So it stayed with him. And I think that sense of underlying grief, people in his plays, even from Rose and Cranes, history comes at them. They turn up, they don't know why they're there. They don't know where they can get home again. They're often in exile. They can barely remember their own name. They may have been wrongfully incarcerated. They may have some terrible moral dilemma that they don't know how to solve. They may have lost someone. And over and over again, I think you get that sense of loss and longing in these very funny witty plays. And that's what appeals to me. That's what I find so, so remarkable about him. And an earlier biography, which he claims never to have read called Double Life? Yes, Double Life, I think, yeah. By Ira Nadell, an American writer. He writes there about doubling in Stop Art himself in his plays. And he's an extraordinary thing because he has had two names, two identities. He insisted for a long time that he had no physical memory of growing up, of being in Czechoslovakia or much of India. But it seems to be written in your book that it is as if the later plays more and more of Tomas Straussler comes through. Yes. I mean, it was a perfectly good premise, I think, to call that earlier biography, Double Lives. I'm a little weary myself of doing that sort of thematizing of a life before you've actually read it. So I've never had subtitles or second titles for my books because I really just want to see where that person takes me and where that life takes me. But certainly there is a lot of doubling going on and you have plenty of twins and double acts going on in the plays. The fact that, as he put it to me, I'll find my life was very exciting up to the age of eight. The fact that he has that extraordinary past life of growing up in Zlin in what was then Czechoslovakia, his father, a Jewish doctor, having to leave when the Nazis came, going to Singapore when the Japanese invaded and his father was killed and his mother taking her two little boys, not really knowing where they were going in all the terror, the chaos of everything. Ending up in Darjeeling where she works for the butter shoe firm that had been the centre of Zlin and his father worked in the butter hospital. And from the time he was in India, certainly he was speaking English all the time at school and then his mother married Ken Stoppard, English major and got her family, got her children to safety in England. And so Tom, as he put it, put on Englishness like a coat when he arrived in England. And in a sense that there's, because his mother then absolutely determinedly assimilated and was afraid of anti-Semitism in England and didn't want her English husband to be dogged by her past, absolutely put her past behind her. I mean, it's not uncommon in that generation, it's not uncommon in people who have lived through such experiences of exile and of loss. But the fact that several members of her toast family were killed in the Holocaust was not something that Stoppard found out about until he was in his fifties. And it was not something that he began to write about until very late on. And even then, although you're saying that Thomas Trussler, his childhood name comes into the picture more and more in his later work, he still doesn't make it directly autobiographical. I mean, the family in Leopoldstadt is a Viennese, is a middle-class, wealthy Viennese family. It's not a doctor's family from his lineage. So he keeps that in mind. Although one of the advantages you have, as you say, is seeing all the drafts in the library and the archive, he did come close to writing very directly about himself in the play that became rock and roll. At one point was going to be, what would have happened if Tom Thomas had stayed in Jezus of Achia? Yes, the main character, Jan, was in the drafts. You can see he's called Thomas as Stoppard said, which I suppose is still my name in a tone of life. Wildermann to not being quite sure. Yes, and clearly the political alternative to go to England, to find yourself in a free country, to have not gone back to Czechoslovakia as it then was and live under communist repression, to be able to speak freely and write freely, unlike the person who perhaps is his most central alter ego in his life, Baxav Havel, whose cause and the cause of Charter 77 and of political prisoners and Soviet Jewish refugees and so on, Stoppard became hugely involved with in the 70s as he did with the Belarus theater people in the 2000s. So his own, what he has for a long time called his luck, his chance, the throw of the dice, the throw of the coin that has meant, he has been part of this free country, which for a long time he idealized, I think, and even romanticized as the land of the free, which made him naturally tending towards a sort of conservative allegiance, particularly in the 1980s, naturally tending against the work of the press unions, for instance, which made him, I think, very unpopular in left-wing, the tree in theatrical circles for a while, though I think he's become far more sort of left-wing as if that's the right word, as time has gone on. But that idea that what matters more than anything else is true free language and being able to have a kind of moral equilibrium that is not repressed or suppressed by a totalitarian regime or a totalitarian utopianism of any kind, that's right at the heart of this work. And we have to be careful of plot spoiling because sadly, so few people so far have seen the approach that, but we strongly hope they will in due course. But there's another scene in that that I'll allude to, which again, and it strongly is an extraordinary sort of self-portrait in which in one scene, you have a character from the family where people have died and the Holocaust had suffered genocide and oppression and prejudice who has grown up in England in a rather cavalier way about it all. And I've rarely felt such a sense of a writer as such a self-critical scene. Yes, I think we can talk about it because the play after all is in print, so people can read it. And I mean, without going into too much detail, the young man who comes to Vienna and finds the two living surviving members of what was a very large family, most of whom have been killed in the Holocaust or whose lives have been completely wrecked. And he got away as a baby and his mother has done what Stopod's mother did, which is to not talk about it. His mother's died in the play. And he comes back and he's rather blithe, he's rather smug, he's rather casual. He doesn't understand what's happened. And one of these two characters who are giving him the lesson of his past say to him, nobody's life begins at the age of eight. And when I was talking to Stopod about this play, he said the whole play was written in order for that line to be spoken on stage. No, it's extraordinary. And when I, as you are knowledge, interviewed him several times over the years. Yes, he did. He was very revealingly too. He said more to you than he said to most people. There was an apology in effect later on because I'd been banging away, boring away for years about the fact, check us the Vakia, Judaism, you've had two lives. And he always, always knocked it back. And then only after his mother's death, did he in effect apologize and say, look, I couldn't talk about all that when my mother was alive because she just didn't want me to. One of the things you see in the letters to his mother, which are enormously touching and interesting is a kind of ongoing argument with her about his political activity. When he's defending, he's really standing out and defending the Soviet jury, Soviet refused nicks and running big protests on the steps of the National Gallery and getting big international support for these people. And she is worried for him. She's very worried that somehow things will turn against him and he will be in some way punished for this. It will be somehow dangerous to him. And you find him writing and saying, look, I need to do this. Why should I live my single privileged safe life? And I'm sorry it upsets you, but this is something that I feel I need to do. And I don't really think I am in danger. Other people are in danger. That's what this is about. So there clearly was a kind of, I would struggle is too strong a word because they obviously got on extremely well and loved each other. But there was clearly a tension there. And I think that, yes, after she died, he did feel, I think that he was now able to speak and think, and of course he went back to having, he went back to India, he went back to Zleen. He went back to Prague. He revisited quite a lot at that point in the 90s and wrote a piece at the time, which was partly about a meeting with a cousin who he hadn't really known, who told him the family story. She sort of drew the family tree from him on the back of a napkin in the middle of a rehearsal at the National Theater. And he says to, were we Jewish? This is a stonishing question for a man in his 50s. And she said, yes, of course you were Jewish. And then she tells him where everybody died. What happened to her? And that conversation, which is in that article, which was in a magazine called Talk, and it was called by him on turning out to be Jewish. There's the title they gave it. That very conversation is replicated in The Apostle. And one of the, we talked about the doublings, one of them which the critic Kenneth Tynan made much of in a profile. But I thought of it when you were talking about his sense of why he had to be particularly engaged was that you have Stophard and Havel, who as you say, were friends. And Havel in a different sense had a charmed life, but it was terrible for a long time. And then he became president of his country. And he does seem, and in, I think, one of the great television plays, Professional Fowl, which is set in Poland, because he, as you say, he tends to do that slight distancing. But you do, you have a profound sense there of his luck in being Tom Stophard rather than Vasslev Havel, or any of the other dissidents who were... Can I read a letter that he wrote to Havel? Sorry, I hadn't thought about doing this, although... I think I can, I think I can find it. Why do you find out that they send your questions in as we're moving towards the half of this now? So, can I read for two minutes? Could I read this for two minutes? So, it's about what you've been doing there. It's Tom Stophard's support of Vasslev Havel through the 70s and 80s when he's constantly either in prison or under surveillance before the Velvet Revolution. And Stophard has done, by then, a translation of Lager Desalato, Havel's play. In 1984, Havel was out of jail but under surveillance. He had no passport and could not leave the country. Stophard, at his request, went to the University of Toulouse to accept an honorary doctorate on his behalf. He read Havel's speech for him, which was published as Politics and Conscience. It's Havel's speech set in personal systems of totalitarian power against the natural world and the humanity of individuals and recommended what Havel called anti-political politics. Politics is practical morality, a service to the truth, as essentially humanly measured care for our fellow humans. Stophard read the speech and made some comments which he jotted down in note form. The last note was, and this is very typical of Stophard, all political questions are moral questions. Back home in England, a few weeks after this trip, he wrote to him, Stophard wrote to Havel. I'm feeling rather conscious of you today for a very peculiar reason. I dreamt last night that I had been sent to jail, I don't know why, for three years. My dream was about my first day in jail. I was in a terrible despair about being there and in my dream, hoped it was only a dream but knew it wasn't. Then one of my children woke me up when he was going to school. And after the first moment of relief that I wasn't in jail but merely in bed, I immediately thought of you and how frightful it must have been when there was no possibility of waking up and finding yourself at home. Isn't that a stretch? No, that's an amazing letter. As they were moving towards the questions and we've got some interesting ones here, but a couple more things I was going to talk about. We made the point that this is the first time in your major biography as you've written about a living person. But also, when you've written previously about novelists, essentially, your two sources are the text and the life and then you can do whatever you want with them and there are a variety of things you can do. In this case, there's a third factor, which is the... Several more factors. But the production life of the play has stopped up in itself. A theater text is a template for something else. Yes, theater is an event, not a text. Yes, he often says it. Well, this is one of the big challenges. Partly it's to do with the fact that this is not just generic. This is a particular person of extraordinary energies and concentration when he really gets going. So that you really want your writing to be like a musical stave so you can do sort of six things at once on one line because he's writing a play, thinking about another. He's rehearsing a previous production. He's involved in casting. He's maybe doing a film script. He might be doing some radio. He's probably giving a couple of lectures. He's also got a big social life and a family life going on at the same time. So there's quite breathtaking the amount of energy that streams through this life and which I tried to put into the book. But also, yes, he doesn't leave his plays alone. Once they're out there, as you well know, he follows them. He doesn't go to every rehearsal of every production at Rosencrantz. He couldn't possibly. But when there is a major revival, either here or in the States, he will try and go and he will try and as he puts it, look after my play and make sure that terrible things are being done to it. But the other remarkable thing, I had the very good luck to sit in rehearsal and watch him with two new plays, Hard Problem and Vehicle Start and two revivals, The Marble Travesties and the Le Vaux 50th Anniversary Production for Rosencrantz. And in the case of the revivals of these classic plays, he's doing some tweaking, you know, 50 years on. He's on extraordinary sight to see this cast of actors for Rosencrantz, most of whom hadn't been born when Rosencrantz was put first on at the Old Vic, including Daniel Radcliffe, you know, sort of wide-eyed and watching, I thought about saying, why don't we put another line for Gertrude in here? But this plays in print, it's taught, it's an A-level text, you know. But for him, it's not a sacrosanct, not a movable feast, if you like. It's something to quote one of his favorite authors. It's something that can be gone back to and moved and he was very will, well, not entirely willing but quite willing with Patrick Harbour's production but it's just some quite silly new gags. It did make their way into the revised edition of the play. So it's a very fascinating and extraordinary thing to watch this person at work on his own work, where the thing that's happened in his mind, where every word counts and every phrase is perfect and every piece of language is rung out as perfectly as possible. And then when he gets in the room with all these people, which he loves, he'll change things and he'll add things and he'll order things. He said, I once put in a new line so that because someone didn't have time to get from the bed to the door. So he's a pragmatist. He'll put in things or he'll tweak things for pragmatic reasons, but he doesn't want other people to do the tweaking. But also, as for you as a biographer and critic, that you had to deal with this new aspect that if you were writing about Edith Wharton or Virginia Woolf, the text is the text. But all the time... Not entirely. Well, yes, that's a very complicated, interesting point. We've got another hour on that. That would happen, but you have to do the short version. Well, some writers do realise that. There are more variables in theatre. I sometimes as a critic, I go to see the same production two or three times because you take friends or family, you... It transfers. And it's always astonishing to me. There could be ten minutes difference in the length of the play. Yes, yes. And he's very preoccupied about length. I love that. It was terribly exciting to me. I mean, I've always been very interested in the theatre anyway, though I haven't written about it before. And I love that sense that every single time the play happens, something different takes place. And that was part of the excitement of trying to capture this. And down to the question of which text do you use when you're quoting the plays in the biography? Do you use one that he's revised or do you use the earlier version? I mean, all kinds of little logistical questions that come up. But at the end, you're left with this rather wonderful feeling, which I think paradoxically is summed up in a film of his, not a play, which is in love, where the producer is constantly being asked, people with their hands in their hair going, what's going to happen? Will it be all right? How are we going to manage? How does it all work out on the night to which he replies, it's a mystery. And we've talked about him very affectionately. I'm great admirer of his work. You have written a broadly sympathetic book. On the other hand though, there is a fear, as you well know, which you've written about the art of biography. There's a fear among biographers, they're going to find something so terrible it will put them off the subject. And that has happened to people. It's the subject of some fine fiction, including, as we sadly have to say, the late Alice and Leary now, but the late Alice and Leary is the truth about Lauren Jones is about that issue. With this, quite a few people I know in fear from the literary world at the beginning were saying the opposite. They were saying poor Hermione, he's so nice. Everyone likes him, he's so charming. She's not going to be able to find out anything at all. Now, you haven't found out anything shocking, but I was struck because he is charming and he has fantastic manners. But what you found which struck me was a steeliness, an iciness almost, that the work comes first. Very attentive father, loving father, but if anything gets in the way of the work, it gets out of the way. I'm glad you said that because some of the people reading the book I think can't quite believe that he's as decent a person as he evidently is. This is a decent, loyal, generous, good friend, nice to work with. He doesn't scream at people, he doesn't throw fits, he doesn't throw things at people. I'm thinking of other playwrights we could name. He doesn't do that, but when he wants it to be right and when he thinks it isn't going right, he's very steely and strong, I think. And you have to be, as you know, in that world. It's also very, I was noticed this most of all in the lectures that he wrote to film people, getting involved with the film world, as we all know. The idea that any good film is ever made is sometimes astonishing to me, given the money man and the product hazards and the casting problems, everything that comes in the way. And there were many, many times when he had to fight his corner. I mean, for instance with Parade's End, which I think is a marvelous, marvelous adaptation of Ford's novel, a really great piece of work. And you can see him in the archive, absolutely fighting his corner to not oversimplify, to not put big labels up, explaining what's happening all the time, to keep it to a degree subtle and sinuous and complex and rich and not have everything spelt out. And you can see him getting pretty cross, actually. There's also a story I chose what he's up against and all film writers are and TV writers. He writes a fairly obscure work called Squaring the Circle, which was about a terrible time. Solidarity and the revolution in Poland. But there's a moment where he sends a script to a friend who says, well, I didn't think much of it, but I love that scene. And he realizes that he didn't write the scene. Yes. The script just as happens in movies, the script just doesn't. The other thing about Squaring the Circle, which Spanishing is that what he wanted to do was to put into the screenplay an ambiguous, undecided narrator, a kind of Tom Stoppard doesn't know figure, someone who couldn't actually make his mind up about the rival claims of the regime and of the solidarity movement and of what was going to happen to Poland as a result. And the people, the producers, the funders absolutely hated this character. And you find it sort of vestigially still in the play, but he clearly had a big battle with that. And that's a very good example where ambiguity works better on the stage than it does on film very often. One of the, we're just about to open it up to the questions, we've got a good selection here. One of the reasons I may be unusual in this, but in literary biographies, I'm always fascinated in the works they didn't write for some reason, they started a man abandoned. And I think we all are, but there are some very interesting examples here. One is that there was the very beginning of a stage play before Leopold's death, which was about artificial intelligence. Now you say in the book, and it's even stranger now, you say it's a good thing he abandoned it because so many people were writing about artificial intelligence. Ian McEwen was, there was a movie. Now, Kazuyo Ishiguro, the mobile laureate, his next, the novel that comes out in March is about artificial intelligence, but that's one, then there's a screenplay about presidential bodyguards. So it is, again, Daniel Beckett would have written that actually. But there isn't much. As he quite often says, I don't really have a lot in my bottom drawer. I mean, he's not actually a writer who has 10 unfinished masterpieces stashed away. It's, although you're quite right that there are some interesting examples, I found it rather unusual in his working life that he should have abandoned something. He tends to feel I've started so often. Well, there was a screenplay writer, your band have several. People who saw the bizarre version of Katz, the musical, he even, he wrote a script of that. He did, that didn't come off. And that's rather fun, actually. It's full of bits of TS Eliot that weren't in the original. Because, you know, he has a passion for Eliot and it goes all the way through his writing life. And it was terribly nice to see him having fun with that. But alas, it never got made. No, and the other very weird one got made, my friend. Well, we've got some questions. So, oh, this is like an exam. I might give my answer and then see. Oh, no, I think you should let me give my answer first. In case I get it wrong. Okay, this is from Paul Douglas, who says, really enjoying the event. Who are Tom Stoppard's main influences? Main influences. Influences without an R. The influencers with the R are the people who are in Dubai. Well, I'll tell you a very interesting single answer to that. We've already talked a bit about James Saunders. We talked a little bit about Beckett, who is clearly in there. I've just mentioned Eliot. But the person that, this came as a surprise to me. I didn't know this until I started the work. He is an enormous fan of Hemingway. And he has collected Hemingway and he used to go to Hemingway conferences. And he's written pieces about Hemingway. And when he was a very young journalist of Bristol, he used to like to do Hemingway spoofs and parodies. And it's interesting, I think, because one of the things he loves about Hemingway is a very strong sense of a kind of moral point of view in the writing. I'm not talking about the human being Hemingway, which is all the time held back. So I think one of the things he really likes about that American writer is that held back quality. Now that might seem a rather strange thing for me to say about a writer who is so incredibly fluent and energetic and voluble and never at a loss for words. But it's got an affinity, I think, when you think about what we've been talking about, which is that the slight disguise, slight sort of restraining himself from he's not a writer like John Osborne or David Hare actually, who sort of pours his own feelings out onto the stage. He doesn't do that. And I think that holding back in Hemingway is something that he was terribly interested in from very young. So there's my example. What's your- No, no, no, no. I'm excited by that. But you have his near contemporary Harold Pinter who was influenced very strongly by Beckard. But also by Hemingway because Stoppard's play that I think he went out to be published or performed The Gamblers, which is that little one. And Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, The Early Play are both heavily influenced by Hemingway's The Killers, I think, aren't they? That short story. Yes, I think that's right. And I think that may be one of the few examples where there is a kind of Pinter-ish feeling in Stoppard because I think they're very different kinds of playwrights. Interestingly, that they got on very well. Stoppard enormously admires Pinter. Stoppard is a modest human being, actually, to a degree. And he will say of Pinter that he thinks he completely changed the landscape, completely changed what Pinter can do. And he's not gonna feel that he's done that. I think other people would argue that he has. But he clearly feels that Pinter is the genius there. And Pinter became, in effect, less Jewish as a writer, and Tom Stoppard became more Jewish. I wouldn't want to say that. Tom, I don't epigram for me. I can't. I'm not gonna follow you then. And then Paul also asks, with a second bite, what is Hermione's favourite Stoppard play? It depends which one I'm reading or seeing. But I have a deep fondness for the invention of love. I know that that's a rather odd choice. The play about Hausman, the old Hausman meeting the young Hausman. And this painful and poignant meeting of the classical scholar and the poet. And I'm very moved by the way in which Hausman is always trying to get back from the land of the dead to the land of the living. But as Karen, the fairy man says to him, it can't be done, so it can't be done. It's a deeply touching and moving play. And I think it's got a lot of Stoppard's own feelings in it. And he did like it very much. And then of course, Arcadia and of course, the airport stat. And I'm also very fond of Indian ink. But I thought, I was very glad you mentioned professional foul earlier on, which I think is one of the great radio, one of the great television. TV plays. Yeah, of all time. Well, I think we've affected, Monica Kendall has asked, is there a particular production that you both remember that stands out? Monica says, I can still see Resmond Cranston-Gildenstern with John Stride and Edward Pettenbridge tossing poems with Hamlet dashing around in the background. Monica says, I was about 15, that's 50 years ago. Yes, it is 50. Well, it's now slightly more, yeah. I suppose John Wood is Henry Carr, it's one of the things that stays in my mind as a really astonishing performance. Yeah, there are many. What about you? Well, I think you can find professional foul in certain places, so I urge people to watch that. I think the radio play, The Dog It Was That Died, I have a great affection for. Because the thing we talked about earlier about the combination of high intelligence and I'm not gonna say low because I think that's wrong, but of popular humor, that is so strongly, excuse me, that's so strongly in that play, The Dog It Was That Died, radio play, inferior TV version later, but you get more common-wise carry-on style puns, but you also get a real, again, there's a deep serious heart to that play. I think what you get in it, yes. If you're a double agent, which one are you? And of course that recurs in hat good. You confuse yourself by being a double agent because you can't remember which side you're on. But I think also what you get in these comedies that we've been talking about, and indeed in professional foul and other plays too, is a very strong sense of what Englishness is. And it may be that he's able to do that because he's not English. He's completely part of the English establishment and part of the English theater world. And I'm saying English rather than British because I think there is a kind of sort of old-fashioned feeling of Englishness about this. When we used to talk about English eccentricity and the quirks of English behavior and sort of oddities of the way historically English people have been thought to behave by other nations. And I think that's part of his comedy, actually. Yeah, it's a subject for another discussion by the Royal Society of Literature, but I think English, yes. I mean, John McCarrie, again, awfully, we have to say the late John McCarrie now, who worked with Thomas Stoppard and they were friends. But yeah, he's an English writer. He's not a British writer. And I think these distinctions, in the way that some writers are Scottish or Welsh, it's hard to know what a British writer would be. I had a wonderful conversation with David Cornwall, alias John McCarrie, about Stoppard. It was one of the most interesting, for me, one of the most interesting interviews that I had. And David Cornwall proposed to me that he and Stoppard had a deep similarity, which they had never talked about, which was that they had both been rather unhappy at their English public schools. I think McCarrie rather exaggerated Stoppard's unhappiness, that they both lost fathers for different reasons and that there was a kind of darkness part of the way they saw the world, which was not made apparent. It was a sort of secret feeling and that he, David Cornwall was aware of in Tom Stoppard's character. It's one of the things that drew them together. That was Cornwall's analysis of this. Stoppard read that passage in the book and made no comment. So. But also, which they've mentioned, a certain type of English speech, English upper class speech. I mean, they both, as writers, have had great fun with that. They've had fun with it. Yes, they're not identified with it at all. No, actually, no, but I mean, there's an outsider hearing the ear for that kind of speech. Now, this is from Victoria who says, I'm loving this, but I'm curious. Dame Hermione, are you friends with Sir Tom after seven years of writing? Being a biographer is such a strange relationship. Do you always stay at arm's length? I'm sure you are invited to the gorgeous parties, although I think the ones in the physics garden have stopped. Well, there was one quite recently, which you were rumoured to be at. But I'm sure he and his wife are still hosting fantastically. Just wondering, now the dust has settled and this splendid book is out. Do you know him better than anyone or is it a cool professional relationship? That's a good question and a proper question. I knew him rather slightly before he asked me to embark on this. And I think that may have been one of the reasons he asked me to do it. Because we weren't friends. We were acquainted. And of course, I have got to know him quite well through talking to him about his life, but it's only for the job, as it were. I mean, I think that he will always be generous and friendly to me for as long as we live. I can't imagine falling out with him over anything, nor can I imagine spending enormous amounts of time with him again, because this was the time I spent with him was to do with the professional job of both of us carrying out our commitments to this job. And I'm very relieved and glad that there haven't been horrible fallings out along the way. And I know many stories about biographers who have tried to work on living subjects or who have tangled with the relations of recently dead subjects. And it's very difficult. It's one of those very difficult situations. But ultimately, yeah, there is a kind of pragmatic professionalism about a biographer's relationship with their subject, whether that subject be dead or alive. That is a question from Vanessa McMahon, which is effectively about whether your job is yet done, on Sir Tom. She says, is Tom Stoppard working on another play? Or did he accept the biography as he had decided to stop writing? No, quite the opposite. I thought that I was finished when I got to his 80th birthday and that was actually where I was going to stop. And then he starts to write a major play, which was, you know, probably exciting, but I must say I didn't wipe my brow at that moment. I thought, oh, I've got to write another chapter now. Because that would have been 2017, presumably, yeah. Yes, exactly. And then it goes back up to nothing. Which is, we say this, it's very, very rare if you think of the fragments that Beckett and Pinter and others were writing later in life. It's very, very rare for a playwright to write a major play past the age of 80. Yes, that's an interesting point. Whether there is more to come, I have no idea. I really hope there will be. And then we're almost done here. I think, oh, yes, Ross Settles says, assuming Stoppard is in the Premier League and then Pat Sunferly doubting your knowledge of football says that means 20 of modern playwrights, where would you place him in the league and why? I suppose it's whether you do living or... This is the sort of question that he would really hate. And although I am not trying to speak on his behalf because I don't have the right to do that. When you began this enterprise tonight, you said we can probably call him the greatest living playwright. I'm kind of afraid that he absolutely abhors, he finds it embarrassing, he doesn't want to accept that title and he thinks, and here's my answer, it's too soon to tell. Well, it was Iman Pinter for a while and then Carol Churchill is in there now, but it's a small number of candidates. If that title were to be bestowed, which you have sternly suggested, it should not be. So, yes, we're coming up to 8.30. So I think I'm going to hand back now to Molly Rosenberg, who is the Chair of the Law Literary Society. So before you go, Mark, thank you very much. I've had a great time. Thank you, I'm going to just give you which is what all authors are in here for, really, a plug, which is this is Hermione's extraordinary biography of Tom Stoppard. Do read it. Thank you. Thank you. Molly. Thank you so much, Hermione and Mark. And I'm sure after hearing that and seeing the very book itself, you'll be eager to buy it, Tom Stoppard, a life, if you haven't already. You can do that at the top of your screen through the British Library's online bookshop. If you want to come to events like these for free, and let's be honest, why wouldn't you? Please join the Royal Society of Literature. Our membership starts at £40 a year and gives you free access to all of the RSL's events, our publications and our book groups, which are now online. Our next event is on the 4th of March in another collaboration with the British Library and this time with Leeds Lit Fest as well, we'll be welcoming Andrea Levy's Friends and Family for a conversation led by journalist Gary Young on what would have been her 65th birthday. Joining Gary will be Melanie Abraham's, Kwame Dawes, Bill Mablin, Ella Mesmer and Michael Perfect. The day before that, you can also come to the RSL online book club. I'll be co-hosting with Dr. Emily Sobel Marshall and we'll be discussing Andrea Levy's Small Island in preparation for the event. So please join us for that. Members and fellows of the RSL can book through our website and for public tickets, which are free for both of those. You can go through the British Library. A big thank you from me this evening to everyone at the British Library, to my colleagues at the RSL, particularly our events manager, Beth Gallimore and our producers, unique media for making tonight possible and to all of you for joining us. Until next time, a final massive thank you to Mark and to Hermione and good night to you all.