Johnson meets Stoppard: Telegraph’s annual Scientists Meet the Media Party 1992
❚ TRIBUTES HAVE POURED IN following the death of our greatest contemporary playwright Tom Stoppard, aged 88. I have been lucky enough to cross his path several times, notably when I invited him to the Telegraph’s annual Scientists Meet the Media Party in 1992 (pictured), where he was the only one of a dozen authors to accept the invitation. His reason was to ask how he could meet Britain’s leading expert in chaos theory, who luckily was in the room, and proved to be Prof Robert May (later Govt Chief Scientist). The result one year on was easily Stoppard’s finest play, Arcadia, wittily set in two time periods, and awarded Best New Play of 1993.
I saw Stoppard’s first play in 1967 at the Old Vic under the National Theatre’s regime there. This was the absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a debut that “changed the course of postwar theatre”, according to critic Harold Hobson. Stoppard took its title from lines in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and followed the two bit-part actors R&G off-stage while a full blown production of Hamlet swept on and off around them. Dazzling, brilliant, inventive. I immediately wrote the unknown playwright a breathless fan-mail and received an autographed card in reply. Sigh.
His other masterpieces have included Jumpers, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (featuring the entire London Symphony Orchestra under André Previn) and Travesties, all collecting umpteen major awards.
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 