Celebrating the Life and Writing of a Literary Giant
Today in London a who’s who of the literary world will be observing what may be the inaugural memorial day for the late playwright Tom Stoppard. Celebrations center around the renaming of the Duke of York’s theatre in Stoppard’s honor just as a buzzy revival of his masterpiece Arcadia returns to the West End. We mourned the award-winning playwright last November, when he died at 88, and just to affirm his new canonization, we’re revisiting tributes.
In The Observer, Stoppard’s biographer Hermione Lee reflected on the playwright’s bottomless energy. While she was writing her intimate survey (Tom Stoppard: A Life), Stoppard and his wife Sabrina hosted the writer at their Dorset home “for long interviews over several years.”
Lee remembers him as a uniquely enthusiastic subject. (Which makes sense from this fan’s perspective, given how much people in his plays love to talk.) “I would be ready with my notebook at 9am,” she wrote.
He would emerge at about eleven, having as usual read long into the night. The conversations became increasingly energetic as the day wore on, as he smoked and ate sweets and told stories, and by eleven at night he would have become really interested, while I was fading away.
