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.
