Language, Lunacy and Light

Abstract

Reacting against the ‘theatricality’ of Jumpers and Travesties Stoppard said in 1974 to Ronald Hayman: ‘What I’d like to write now is something that takes place in a whitewashed room with no music and no jumping about, but which is a literary piece — so that the energy can go into the literary side of what I do’. But two years later he was questioning the ‘literary’ as much as the ‘theatrical’. He had now ‘done a little joke play rather quickly’ for Ed Berman and ‘a piece to go with an orchestra’ for André Previn, was currently working on a screenplay of Nabokov’s Despair for Rainer Fassbinder, and expressed to Hayman his great admiration for J. B. Priestley’s ‘sheer craftsmanship’. Watching The Linden Tree on television, he found himself wanting to write a conservative play about a middle-class family. ‘I felt I was sick of flashy mind-projections speaking in long, articulate, witty sentences about the great abstractions.’ Having promised Michael Codron a play, he thought of it as ‘a chance to write my West End play, to write The Linden Tree or the Rattigan Version’.