Tom Stoppard Journalist: through the Stage Door

Tom Stoppard Journalist: through the Stage Door KATHERINE E. KELLY At the age of seventeen, Tom Stoppard left school to join the Western Daily Press as a reporter, feature writer, humorous columnist and reviewer of plays and films . The move was to be decisive for his future as a playwright. Not only would his apprenticeship encourage the young Stoppard to develop and cultivate a prose style but it would introduce him to actors at the Old Vic and lesser provincial theatres where he gradually learned the practical business of stagecraft by observing a multitude of plays succeed and fail before live audiences. He entered the news profession hoping eventually to lead a dangerfilled life as a foreign correspondent, a dream at which he later poked fun: " I wanted to be Noel Barber on the Daily Mail or Sefton Delmer on the Daily Express - that kind of big-name, roving reporter. Noel Barber actually got shot in the head in Budapest, which put him slightly ahead of Delmer as far as I was concerned." I But he instead developed the journalist's habit of researching a story that would survive as the cornerstone of his playwriting method. As he explained to Ronald Hayman in 1974, reading gave him something to write about. As a journalist, one "[Rlead[sl the works of Norman Mailer in fourteen days in order to write an article of 1200 words." 2 With some important exceptions, Stoppard still finds his material for plays as he would for news stories, largely outside of his personal life and frequently in the works of other weitees. The beginnings of his disillusionment with actual newswriting can be traced to his move from provincial Bristol to London. Expecting Fleet Street to be filled with brilliant writers, Stoppard discovered instead that most reporters wrote badly and, worse, they didn't much care: " I misunderstood the nature of Fleet Street. It wasn't until I had been there and looked about that I realised that people weren't actually that good; most of them were terrible, and would have been well down the batting-order in Bristol. " 3 In spite of his disappointment with Fleet Street, Stoppard has remained a devoted fan of Tom Stoppard Journalist journalism - even a self-styled "groupie" - on the one hand dazzled by the glamour of roving correspondents and on the other ideologically committed to the principle of press freedom as the primary guarantor of human rights. In his earliest years with the Western Daily Press, Stoppard, like most beginners, wrote without a byline.4 He also occasionally reviewed plays as what I would assume to be a third-string critic (the prototype for murderous Puckeridge of Reallnspector Hound?) as two other regularly featured drama critics wrote under a byline during this period, and a third (Stoppard?) wrote without one. Stoppard later wrote additional drama reviews under the arts page editorship of A.C.H. Smith who found them "marvellous, extraordinary . " But Stoppard dismisses this period of his writing career as embarrassingly egotistical: "There is a sort of second-rate journalism that presents the journalist more than the subject. I did that."S SO does Moon, Real Inspector Hound's second-string critic, based in part on Stoppard's younger self as an ambitious drama reviewer in provincial Bristol. 6 First performed in 1968, Hound is, among other things, Stoppard's good-natured laugh at a profession he had abandoned five years earlier. Before he could write it, he had to spend several years hanging around theatres, which is exactly what he had done. Stoppard relied on his intimate acquaintance with actors and critics for the plot and characters of Hound. The ponderously serious Moon, obsessed with his own ambitions, sounds familiarly Stoppardian in his private reveries: It will follow me to the grave and become my epitaph - Here lies Moon the second string: where's Higgs? ... Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d'llat by the second rank [ ... j [Sjtand-ins of the world stand up! (p. to) Birdboot, on the other hand, sounds distinctly non-Stoppardian in his reliance on the review cliche: [I]t has a beginning, a middle and I have no doubt...