Rufus Sewell, Christine Baranski, Susan Wokoma, Toby Jones and Harriet Walter share their unforgettable encounters with a theatrical giant
I worked with Tom when I was quite young, on Arcadia in 1993, and again on Rock’n’Roll 13 years later. In the interim it slowly dawned on me that not all jobs were like that. He was one of the most intelligent people you could ever meet but the extraordinary thing was that you’d walk away from conversations with him feeling like you were not unintelligent or unwitty yourself. That’s not always the case with incredibly brilliant writers and funny people. That generosity of spirit marked my time with him. He was incredibly good company, very sweet, and you felt encouraged to put forward your own ideas, make your own jokes.
That feeling, that he had loaned his magnificent intellect to you, was the same in his work. You’d see a play imparting all these competing ideas and you would leave abuzz and pretty confident you could explain it to your friends but you had to make sure that you’d worked out exactly how to do so before you reached Hammersmith because that was when it would start to evaporate. You would feel the benefit of his genius probably about as far as Barons Court.
