PLAYWRIGHT TOM Stoppard revealed the secret of his stagecraft to students in Dublin last night: there is no secret.
The author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was a guest of Trinity College’s Philosophical Society, commonly known as The Phil.
“The illusion abroad is that the playwright has secrets about his play which he might tell you if your letter is endearing enough,” he said. “The sad fact is there are no such secrets. It’s not a riddle; it’s not a puzzle.”
However, Stoppard suggested not every writer, no matter how talented in other fields, was “cold blooded” and “hard hearted” enough to be a playwright. “There are any amount of really good writers, some of them my friends, a few of them, who can’t write plays at all. “There’s something very cold-blooded, hard-hearted, about the process of writing for the theatre and for film.”
He said it was important for aspiring playwrights to remember that the most memorable moments in a dramatic production were often not in the script at all. “A writer for theatre should keep this thought close to his heart.”
Stoppard spoke about rehearsals for his play The Real Thing, which recently ran at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
When the play was first produced in the 1980s, he had worked hard to keep a “secret” under wraps until the second scene. However, he had a “strong moment of self-questioning” when rehearsing recently.
“It struck me at that moment it was no longer a new play and we were trying to safeguard a secret from people who already knew it.”
