Carrie Cracknell, Nina Raine and Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin share memories of working with the playwright and ‘guardian angel’Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, co-founding artistic directors of Belarus Free Theatre Continue reading...
Carrie Cracknell, Nina Raine and Belarus Free Theatre’s Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin share memories of working with the playwright and ‘guardian angel’
Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, co-founding artistic directors of Belarus Free Theatre
The director worked with theatre colossus Tom Stoppard on two smash hits. Here, he remembers their heated rehearsals, the night they stayed up watching Jaws – and the last four cigarettes they smoked togetherTom was my hero from the night I first saw Travesties in 1979. I was 15. The older kids at school did a production of it and I was spellbound; it was glamorous, sensual and completely incomprehensible. I wanted to know everything about this cool, obscure playwright. I started in the school l
The director worked with theatre colossus Tom Stoppard on two smash hits. Here, he remembers their heated rehearsals, the night they stayed up watching Jaws – and the last four cigarettes they smoked together
Tom was my hero from the night I first saw Travesties in 1979. I was 15. The older kids at school did a production of it and I was spellbound; it was glamorous, sensual and completely incomprehensible. I wanted to know everything about this cool, obscure playwright. I started in the school library with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (incomprehensible) and then I read a third of Jumpers before giving up (totally incomprehensible).
As an English Lit student in the mid 1980s, I studied Stoppard and found his work slightly less incomprehensible. But in 1993, I saw the original production of Arcadia and felt that same spell I’d felt as a child. Let’s call it art. And beauty. And words spoken from a stage like no one else. A couple of years later, my first play, Dealer’s Choice, had just opened at the National Theatre and Tom was on the board. Someone told me: “Stoppard saw your play and mentioned it in some speech to donors as a good example of new writing at the NT.” A week or so later, I met him at a drinks do. He approached me. He approached me. All hair and suit and cigs and warmth. He gave me a hug and told me I was a proper young playwright.
A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriterTom Stoppard: a life in picturesMichael Billington: ‘A brilliant dramatist who always raised the temperature of the room’The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88.On Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family. They paid tribute to t
A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter
The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88.
On Saturday, United Agents said Stoppard died at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family. They paid tribute to the “brilliance and humanity” of his work and “his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language”.
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