The Theater: Ping Pong Philosopher

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John Osborne's Look Back in Anger triggered Stoppard's desire to write plays—as it did many another English no-school-tie boy. His first full-length play, A Walk on the Water (about the family of a noninventive inventor), was produced on BBC television during the week of President Kennedy's assassination. "It wasn't the greatest week to have a comedy on," Stoppard recalls. Three years later came Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead—and fame. In view of the gentle, unassuming nature of Tom Stoppard's personality, fame is a word no weightier than a feather.

Although George, the philosopher-hero of Jumpers, expresses a need for metaphysical convictions, Stoppard claims he himself vacillates between uncertainties: "I might subscribe to certain beliefs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and to a totally different set on Tuesday and Thursday. I think that a sense of conflict between one's emotional response to absolute morality and one's rational sense of the implausibility of there being a God is obviously a part of what I call 'the Ping Pong game.' I always write about two people arguing. I play Ping Pong with myself, but there is no killing shot. It is like Ping Pong against a clock; there is a tendency for the argument to be won by the person who finishes speaking when the bell goes, rather than because there is nothing left to say."

Catch-23. The organic process of writing fascinates Stoppard: "I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is catch-23. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern. Most people think that you build a skeleton and then you know whether you are going to write a dog, a giraffe or whatever. What happens, in fact, is that you do a perfect little finger, and then you do four others, and then you write a wrist. You begin to get a sense of what kind of animal it might be."

Stoppard is particularly drawn to playwrights who shake up an audience's habitual patterns of thought. That is one reason he admires Harold Pinter: "Pinter invented something—not the poetry of ordinary conversation that he is usually credited with, but the notion that you do not necessarily believe what people tell you in a theater. Formerly you did so, unless there was reason for skepticism—as in an Agatha Christie play. In Pinter's plays there is no surface reason for not telling the truth, but he has persuaded an entire generation of theatergoers that people are not necessarily telling the truth, even when they have no reason for not doing so. He broke the first rule of the theater: that you do not betray the audience."