Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Writer’s Week. Adelaide Town Hall. 1 Mar 2023
Cream rises to the top, and so has Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL HonFBA. He is an esteemed and decorated writer, and has written for film, radio, television, and the stage. It is theatre where he shines most brightly (e.g. Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Arcadia, and most recently, Leopoldstadt).
Stoppard has quite an unordinary personal history. In brief, he was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia, and fled the Nazis with his family to Singapore, and thence to India with his mother and brother. Stoppard never saw his father again, who stayed behind and perished during the war. Stoppard was schooled in Darjeeling, and subsequently in England following his mother’s marriage to British army major Kenneth Stoppard, from where he derived his new surname and anglicised first name. After leaving school at age 17 – he never went to university – he became a journalist and wrote drama reviews amongst other things, which led him eventually to becoming a playwright. He has been married three times and has four children, including the stage and screen actor Ed Stoppard.
Stoppard has been influenced in his formative years by world events, and the Writer’s Week festival has also been impacted by the views some of its featured participants have about contemporary world events. The inclusion of Palestinian American Susan Abulhawa and Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd in the program has ignited passionate condemnation because of the preposterous views they hold, such as Abulhawa holding that Ukraine is itself responsible for the current war! There have even been calls for Louise Adler, the director of Writer’s Week, to resign for allowing such writers to have a platform to preach their vitriol.
The evening commenced with a Welcome from Premier Peter Malinauskas whose government has been dragged into the controversy. In his speech he noted that politicians should not lurch to censoring free speech thereby deciding “what is culturally appropriate”. Rather, he opined, the Festival should be about listening to diverse opinions, even unpopular ones, and then challenging them with a view to changing them. Stoppard once said: “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.” Malinauskas and countless others would believe that the ideas and words of Abulhawa and El-Kurd are not ‘the right ones’, but others do. The fight rages on, and there is always unfinished work for word warriors.
In 2013, knowing that several writers were circling him to write his biography, Stoppard pre-empted them and invited Dame Hermione Lee to do the job. Who better? The result has been described as rigorous and affectionate.
The biography – Tom Stoppard: A Life – was published in 2020, and this is the connection to Adelaide Writer’s Week.
Louise Adler, Director of Writer’s Week, has pulled off a coup: she arranged for Dame Hermione Lee and Sir Tom Stoppard to be interviewed about the biography by Professor Glyn Davis AC, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (who apparently is a Stoppard ‘aficionado’), and for it to be filmed. The film was shown at last night’s Writer’s Week event and was followed by a live conversation between Stoppard (appearing via livestream from London via his wife’s smartphone!), the internationally acclaimed Australian-British playwright Suzie Miller (Prima Facie – think Jodie Comer in the stunning recent London West End production), and New Zealand-Australian multi award-winning theatre director Simon Phillips, with Glyn Davis ‘in the chair’.
The filmed interview focussed on the process of the creation of the biography and was full of insights into Stoppard’s psyche. It also gave a glimpse of the inner workings of the mind of a top notch biographer. It was intriguing.
The conversation focussed on the relationship between a playwright and the director. With two top notch playwrights and a first rate director ‘on the couch’, the discussion was brimming with insightful perceptions, rib-tickling humour, and profundity. At one point Stoppard became so absorbed in responding to a probing question from Davis that he lost his way and from behind the wisping smoke from his cigarette he concluded with “But I don’t really remember the question”! The audience lapped it up.
Writer’s Week is so important (and entertaining!). Try to take in an event or two!
Kym Clayton
When: 1 Mar
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
