A few years after Tom Stoppard had decided I would be his biographer, at the beginning of an onstage interview with me in New York, he turned to the adoring audience before I‘d got my first question out, and said genially: “You know the writer who says, ‘Biography adds a new terror to death?’ Well, here she is.” After that, they were putty in his hands.
In fact, there was no terror on either side: he treated me with the utmost courtesy, care and thoughtfulness, though also of course with plenty of wry jokes and intellectual challenges. Having set the process in train, he didn’t especially enjoy being grilled about himself for hours on end, or knowing that I was interrogating everyone he knew. In spite of being one of the most sociable and out-going people in the world, he was also a shy person who didn’t like to show off his emotions. But he took on the task of being a biographical subject, as he took on all his tasks, with scrupulous integrity. He told me I was “on my own”, but that he would help me as much as he could. He was intrigued by the process, and said that it must be like making an ordnance survey map, and a plan of the house and a map of the world.
He lent me amazing source materials, such as the weekly letters he wrote to his mother all through his life, from his schooldays in England in 1948 until her death in 1996; or the journal he kept for his youngest son Ed to read when he grew up; or the black notebook in which he scribbled his first notes for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
He and his wife Sabrina invited me to their house in Dorset for long interviews over several years. I would be ready with my notebook at 9am. 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.
He let me sit in on rehearsals of revivals and new plays (though he always asked the director first). When I watched the work for the 2017 50th anniversary production of Rosencrantz directed by David Leveaux, with a cast who mostly weren’t born when the play was first put on, I was amazed that he was still answering questions about what it meant, still putting in little changes. Two years later, at the end of the first run-through of his last play Leopoldstadt (directed by Patrick Marber) in the rehearsal room, when not an eye was dry, Tom said to the company: “Is it okay for me to cry at my own play?”
As I went round his world, interviewing his friends, theatre colleagues and fellow writers, I couldn’t find anyone with a bad word to say about him. He really was, and is, universally loved and admired. And I became aware of his deep seriousness, as well as his dazzling wit and love of words, his unquenchable brio and his appetite for knowledge. (As Hannah says in Arcadia: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in”). Talking to those he’d helped, such as the Belarus Free Theatre, or hearing of the work he’d done in the 1970s for the victims of Soviet Communism, or watching him give the Pen Pinter lecture in 2013, warning us about the state of England, I realised he wasn’t just a brilliant creative artist and a marvellous entertainer, he was a conscience to us all. I learned from him things that help me in my life: stoicism, calm, patience, a steely commitment to getting things right. “Happiness is...equilibrium”, says Henry in The Real Thing. When you were with Tom, you recognised that sense of equilibrium.
I am profoundly grateful for having had the chance to work with him and to write about him. I think now of what he said of a dear friend at their funeral: He was part of the luck we had.
Photograph by Antonio Olmos for The Observer