Obituary
88 – not a bad knock for someone whose intake of tabs was only surpassed by artist, David Hockey and fellow playwright Dennis Potter
Author of -among many other things – Rosencratz and Guliderstein are Dead and Jumpers on stage, plus cinematic writing or co-writing credits for the likes of Shakespeare in Love and Brazil
88 – not a bad knock for someone who
He also found time to dash off a sublime TV play combining football and dissent and starring the none-more-urbane Peter Barkworth
If you’ve not seen it before, give it a watch, it’s really rather good
Such a great writer. I was in “The real Inspector Hound” at college and had loads of lines to learn but it was a joy as they were so funny and beautifully constructed. I was Moon, the posturing theatre critic if you know the play. “Moon in June, April and September, and no member of the human race keeps warm my bit of space. Like a chocolate?”
My English teacher absolutely raved about Rosencrantz etc, forever having us read it, out loud, in class. All I remember is the “Stop, lest I split my sides in merriment”, after a standard unamusing Shakespearian “joke”.
Married to her out the Good Life, wasn’t he? But a bit of a bugger.
A great writer, but also a thoughtful intelligent human being. And, lest it be forgotten, his family were Jews who escaped the Nazis and fled from Czechoslovakia to England – something he never forgot, as evidenced by his late success with Leopoldstadt.
It’s depressing to think how quickly someone like him – urbane, witty, intellectual, absolutely a member of the intelligentsia, someone not prepared to be pinned down – seems to have become a person out of time. In these times he’d probably get cancelled, for being too liberal or too right wing, or just too damn clever for his own good.
RIP – his best work will certainly live on.
My favourite writer, ever. Too clever by three-quarters, of course, but he had that thing that only Shakespeare and my other hero, Douglas Adams, shared; you don’t always understand the words as they fly past you, but you love the sound they make.
The greatest English language playwright of his lifetime and it wasn’t even his first language.
This speech, from The Real Thing, was something of a writers’ manifesto laid bare for all to absorb and learn from:
HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat.) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. [quoting from the play] ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?”Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! (He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits, going ‘Ouch!’ ANNIE watches him expressionlessly until he desists.)
Had the pleasure, and the honour, of performing it a few years back with the man himself in attendance. And we smoked a tab together from time to time too. If he sensed the awe in which I held him then he bore it very well indeed and was a charming and self effacing presence at all times. I only wish I could have spent more time with him.
A great man. What a body of work. RIP
Michael Horden, that was.
Roger Rees, I think, in the original. Toby Stephens more recently.
Hordern originated the lead in Jumpers, which I watched Simon Russell Beale dazzle in at the NT when it was revived.
Might owe my ‘C’ at English Literature to Tom Stoppard.
All I remember is, having finished the exam, I found myself with a rogue quarter-of-an-hour and so, having clocked that it was originally performed at the end of 66, I wrote a page on Strawberry Fields Forever… absurdist, ‘nothing is real’ etc. etc. Seemed logical at the time, seems logical now.
Of course, it might have cost me an ‘A’.
“After death, fingernails continue to grow for days. The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all”
*The toenails on the other hand?”
RIP
Rosencrantz: Do you think Death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no… Death is “not.” Death isn’t. Take my meaning? Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can’t not be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I’ve frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no… What you’ve been is not on boats.
“Rosencrantz: I don’t believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? ”
Met him once- he was charm personified.
My English teacher at school took our A level group to see “Rosencrantz…” . From that point, I thought Tom Stoppard was a genius and would have been even more impressed if I’d known then that English wasn’t his first language.