Tom Stoppard rarely grants interviews, and is reluctant to speak about his life – even refusing to read the typescript of his recent biography by Ira Nadel, and never asking for corrections. The celebrated playwright is in Oxford to accept the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, and I was told it was unlikely he would agree to talk. His acceptance of my invitation, then, comes as a surprise, and I approach the morning with some trepidation. He speaks in a beautiful, almost hushed voice. As we walk from the marquee in the snowed-over Christ Church meadows, and as he offers me a cigarette (he smokes Silk Cut), I am struck by his charm and sincerity. It is daunting to be face to face with a notoriously elusive intellectual giant – it is practically mortifying to see that he takes you seriously and treats you as an equal. I mention this to him, for he is no stranger to being in this position, having started his career as a journalist at the age of seventeen. He once even constructed an ‘interview’ with Harold Pinter, made up entirely of quotations from previous interviews. Transforming multiple voices, and rendering familiar texts and contexts unfamiliar anew is what he does best.

  It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that he receives with his award a copy of the Portland Vase – a cameo glass Roman vase from the first century BC housed in the British Museum, smashed by a vandal in 1845 and repeatedly restored – a symbol of the fragility and creation of art as an artefact. It seems only natural to question him about the process he employs in writing his plays, for, rather uniquely, he often rewrites scenes, recycles scripts, and refashions his plays during the process of rehearsal and performance. ‘I don’t go into rehearsal in order to defend my text, thinking that the text as it exists is a finished object like a poem. Theatre is an empirical art form, really – a pragmatic one, even.’ For Stoppard, writing a play is a collaborative process – an interactive journey. ‘The event which is a play implicates the audience, the actors, the playwright, and one has to achieve just the right degree of communication and comprehension, neither be undercomprehended or overcomprehended, and perhaps then the text needs just a bit of small adjustment. I don’t resent it, it’s part of the enjoyment of the art form.’

  This attitude is not surprising when one considers how his life has been shaped by multiple and contrasting experiences. Stoppard was born Thomáš Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937, from where his family moved to Singapore to escape the Nazis. His mother moved to India when Singapore was invaded – his father was captured and died in a Japanese prison camp. At the age of eight, the young Thomáš moved again – taking on the English name of his stepfather, Major Kenneth Stoppard. The Major was to write to him many decades later, demanding his name be returned to him. ‘It’s not practical’ was to be Stoppard’s response, to the man who once told him – ‘Don’t you realise I made you British?’ He was to discover, decades later, that his true history – that of a Jewish family – was hidden from him. ‘It affected me much less than people thought it had to affect me – and maybe it just came too late.’
 

These experiences inevitably shaped Stoppard’s writing, which in turn has defined the shape of British drama in the twentieth century. ‘You can only write what you know. I don’t have a secret drawer, and I never seem to have anything saved up and ready to work on… And that’s my present situation, actually. I don’t know what to channel, really.’ His time in India was the basis of In A Native State, a radio play he re-wrote as Indian Ink. ‘I was only eight when I left, but dreamed about India all my life. I used to have dreams about being in India – the kind of dreams where you are very very sorry to wake up – there’s something kind of poignant about it.’

   Poignant, however, is not how his work has always been described. He has too often been criticised for being all head and no heart. Does emotion matter in plays? ‘I think it’s desirable, actually.’ But does what people say affect him? ‘I’m quite an eclectic writer. People always come to me with things they want me to write – "it’ll be perfect for you, Tom" – and that doesn’t really work – because they’re coming off what I have done already, which is the last place where I want to look, really.’

   Looking back is not something he’s afraid of, though, and his plays often deal with multiple time schemes and settings, blending history and fiction. He has an interesting and unavoidable relationship with the past – both literary and historical. ‘I have plays that are set in the past, but I have no special attitude towards that fact.’ He is hesitant to tackle the question of his political allegiances. ‘It registers with me when political issues dissolve into moral issues… I don’t think of left and right… it’s perfectly clear to me if the moral issues were clear cut there would be no issues – that’s why it’s a living problem.’ This is not to say that his plays do not tackle or reverberate with political questions; politics are just not the point.

   ‘The primary impulse in writing plays tends to be lost in favour of secondary and tertiary impulses. The primary impulse for me is that it’s a storytelling art form, and what it has to say about politics as it were, or the community, that might be very pertinent to what the play is trying to do… but somehow of secondary importance. I don’t think theatre gets points for its subject matter any more than what a poem does. I don’t think art gets points for its intention. It gets points for execution. There are other ways of looking at that point and ways of disagreeing with it – and I’m quite happy to disagree with myself in a moment.’

  And disagree he does. For despite this declaration, Stoppard has been linked with the cause of political dissidents in Eastern Europe. ‘I have to say that having made that very point to some silenced semi-exiled artists, writers and actors in Belarus three years ago, I was really shamed and put into place, because one forgets living here that for people living under repression and suppression, there’s no useful distinction to be made between intention and execution, and I think that’s what I would possibly need to remind myself of.’

  When I began by asking if there was any particular direction he wanted our talk to take, he decided to ‘decline the honour or the onus.’ Yet, he is inquisitive – about Oxford, the student theatre scene, and my involvement in it. ‘I shouldn’t be interviewing you,’ he smiles. I am surprised, for I did not think he would be interested in knowing how his plays are produced by students – and I’m quite uncomfortable talking about my own participation with student productions, for fear of making a fool of myself. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his curiosity genuine. ‘I am flattered, but it will pass’, he says, when I mention his undying popularity amongst students.

   Stoppard never went to university, and instead started work as a journalist in Bristol. ‘I came to regret it… but I was anxious to start earning my own living… Probably I was sick of being in the sixth form and didn’t take into account what a liberation being a student would be… but I don’t regret being a journalist I think I got a lot from it.’ Working as a drama critic and a humour columnist for the Bristol Evening World first drew him into the circle of the theatre, making friends with people like Peter O’Toole, who was also starting a career at the same time. He tried his hand at writing a novel, which was a failure, but he found his niche as a playwright. ‘Apart form all the other reasons, there was definitely an element of vanity and self interest, because people were very interested in the theatre. And…I’m not being flippant. There was a knowing part of me that young playwrights got more attention than young novelists at that time; there was a disproportionate amount of attention for young writing for the theatre.’

This sense of the stage being larger-than-life, in a way, has translated itself into a foray onto the screen. He directed a film adaptation of his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, but it is for his co-writing of the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love that his stint in cinema is best remembered. Here, if anyone wanted it, was proof that Stoppard did indeed have a heart.

‘I don’t use the same parts of myself because I’m always treading on someone else’s work…. When I get turned on by a film job, I have a great time doing it.’ And what a great time it gave us, I say! ‘John Madden brought a lot of it to it. He made sure it worked as a love story.’ But it doesn’t always go the way it’s planned. ‘Sometimes it goes horribly wrong. I spent a long time on the Philip Pullman trilogy, but there was no director attached, and it was a completely wasted period as it turns out because the director likes to write his own scripts. But I like working with directors.’

It seems to have paid off. He gently waves off my congratulating him on his haul of the Tony for The Coast of Utopia and the Dan David Prize recently bestowed on him by the University of Tel Aviv. ‘I think I’ve been given it for being seventy, really!’ It is the sort of thing one can afford to say when one is Tom Stoppard, I suppose. When one’s career spans four Tony awards, the first knighthood for a playwright in over twenty five years, and even an Oscar, what more could one possibly ask for?

  The answer, as ever, is candid. ‘Everytime I come to Oxford, and somehow more so this morning because of the snow and the sun and the sky all working together in collaboration with the old stone – I think I would like to be a writer in residence here with no duties – that would be the ideal form of one’s last decade – I don’t know how it strikes you, but to me it’s deeply appealing.’

Venturing inside the book Hundertwasser: the painter-king with the five skins, you come across a psychedelic rainbow of colours spread across almost every page. The five skins of the title – the epidermis, clothes, your house, identity and the earth – pervade his work in the form of rings and lines, waves emanating from his objects like concentric haloes. It was this idea of skins, of layers of identity that stuck with me.

I began to wonder just how much of our identity is formed by where we are now; the place, people, area of the country. To what extent does Oxford define us? I suppose that’s why I put the Rad Cam in the middle, a kind of question mark as to whether these skins should be wrapping around it, or whether we’re like the girl – just visiting.

Flood Cave created an environment that you were forced to examine through physical manipulation. I strung wool across the entirety of the room, using it as a giant loom on which to weave the ‘carpet’ in situ, at the neck-cricking height of about 150 cm above the ground. The fabric of the piece was a selection of curtains, hessian and scraps from local charity shops, The whole thing sagged, and smelt closed like a dusty room, or a dead man’s attic.
I had envisioned the creation of tension through the physical imposition; I had in mind ghost towns, forest fires, flood plains, self-eclipsing landscapes. However, the opposite happened, and visitors lay down like dozy animals in the unforeseen serenity of the piece.

Adams’ photographs are haunting, mystical images which capture beautifully the essence of the landscapes in Yosemite and New Mexico, communicating a calmness and silence in nature. Yosemite is awe-inspiring in the flesh but the monochrome images of Adams find an underlying peace in the place. He was clearly unafraid of focusing on a certain aspect of nature, such as a rose, almost to the point of abstraction.

Adams was also willing to travel to the other end of the spectrum and take photographs which surveyed the vast and impressive landscape of California. There are other images in the collection of the people and churches of New Mexico. Whilst these were sensitive portrayals of life in New Mexico, I found them to be less successful (and certainly more mundane) than the visions of the Grand Canyon.

Something to bear in mind when you see this exhibition is that these photographs were taken from the late 1920s to the early ’60s. Adams was ahead of his time and made great advances in the technology of photography, much of which is standard practice today. Many images in this exhibition could easily appear to be standard dining room posters or the stuff of coffee table picture books. However, one image in particular could never be accused of such a position; Moonrise is an exquisite vision of Hernandez, New Mexico. A cemetery stands in the foreground, the mountains stretch out behind with smooth, flowing clouds above them. Beyond their peaks is the moon, appearing in a dark sky as if it is a completely different world. If I was ever going to believe in a parallel universe I would use this as evidence.
I recommend this exhibition to you wholeheartedly.

If all you could remember of Katie Paterson’s latest exhibition was a muted, monochromatic dream, that’s because it was one. 26-year-old Glaswegian artist Katie Peterson has been working in a series of projects since 2005 which are now on display. Paterson was inspired by a fevered vision, in which she traces the history of her drinking water back to a remote glacier, and metamorphoses into that glacier. Paterson is interested in merging the themes of subjectivity and landscape, as well as the collapsing of the physical and conceptual space.

The two installations on display rely on sound, rather than sight. I am not really sure that this qualifies as art, but its certainly interesting. At the centre of the exhibition is Earth-Moon-Earth: a black piano haltingly plays the Moonlight Sonata while a pair of headphones transmits endless sequences of Morse code. This may not seem like art at first, but the title Earth-Moon-Earth hints at an interesting concept: Paterson used the moon as a satellite, encoded the sonata, bounced it off the moon and then returned it to music here on earth. In the process, random notes of the sonata were lost to the uneven lunar surface, so the result is an odd distortion. The fascination with the imaginative possibilities of sounds is evident in Vatnajökull (the sound of), for which only a white-on-white neon sign ‘07757001122’ is on display. Visitors are invited to dial this number and gain access to the melancholic gurgling of the Vatnajökull glacier — Europe’s largest in volume, now discreetly yet rapidly melting while we listen from a distance. 

There is a contrast between the deceptive stillness in Paterson’s minimalist art, and the unseen turbulence of the landscapes which she portrays. The installations on show are only the tip of the iceberg; they deliberately only give the viewer a minute glimpse of the vastitude beneath. Hers is a world in which time is measured on the double-scale of the eternal and the ephemeral. Caught in nature’s wonder, we are synchronised with the immense clockwork that times the flux of glaciers and the tides of the ocean, not released from the orbit until we leave the room — and perhaps not even then.

Never have the sublime and the ridiculous melded with such elegance as in Ben Johnson’s masterpiece. Although in many ways the exemplar of 17th century  farce, the sheer delight Johnson takes in the vice of his characters, and the equal relish with which he engineers the downfall of each, makes the play powerfully original, concerned with the darker reaches of the human soul.

The satire of this potent piece is perfectly captured in this strong production. Simon Tavener directs with admirable aplomb, keeping the action snappy. Yet he is not afriad to bathe in the comedy of the situation, allowing each character’s foibles to be revealed just as much in the laughable jockying for position as in their sinister scheming. Indeed, the energy of the comedy provides much of the play’s impressive vitality.

Embracing this energy, the set has been pared down as much as possible, so we are forced to focus on the words and actions of the characters themselves; the power of the satirical light shinning on the protagonists is strengthened by the bareness of the setting, touched up only with a handful of lush props for the old fox, Volpone himself.
And what a fox. Brian McMahon delivers a finely honed performance, sending his character hurtling from machination to machination, from delight to disgust, victory to despair. He is well matched by Maanas Jain as Mosca, his servant, by whose aid his schemes are artfully constructed, and, ultimately, utterly ruined. Jain brings real life to Mosca, both swaggering and fawning, reveling in the intricacies of the slave-master bond.

A strong performance from all the supporting cast completes the play, and an artfully constructed balance between caricature and seriousness is reached, spilling over towards caricature in the case of Tom Garner’s Corbaccio. As the action comes to a close it appears that Johnson himself was loathe to say goodbye to his creations, keeping all on  stage until the end, all still caught up in the finely spun web of deceit, and the audience is equally enraptured by this fine play.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. All our communication, our expression, our articulated thoughts must at some point pass through the medium of language: artificial grammars, constructs and semantic boundaries. Even our silences must be eloquent in the framework of a broader on-going conversation with our fellow man. The theatre is no exception. Although theatre is by definition an art of performance and spectacle, it has long engendered the tradition of speech within it. Sometimes it aims for simple expression, sometimes for poetic ambiguity, but always dialogue is a crucial vehicle to carry the weight of theme and sense. This too is subject to the limits of language and our understanding of it.

The argument concerning plays in translation is one that extends to all literary media: can the flow and subtlety of an original piece of literature, with its own nuances of style and idiom, really emerge unscathed in a new and foreign tongue? Perhaps it is déclassé to butcher Italian opera with stylised English libretti and even to translate is solely a populist manoeuvre, perhaps, for those who cannot appreciate the artistry of the original.

True, there is the theatrical mystique of the foreign words. Maybe some plays such as those of Shakespeare seem to require the particular pentametrical tendencies of English and the mores that inspired them. It is also true that sub- titles can be well and subtly placed so as not to detract from a performance. No one would deny the merits of plays in their original language being performed out of their original context, and yet a play, or any other art form, in a foreign language is by its very nature exclusive. It cannot not always be accessible, since one would like to keep an eye on a translation flashing overhead, or a finger poised above an English script, and even then you are still at the mercy of the translator for sense. It is certainly not possible to be fluent in any language that might crop up, nor is it acceptable, I believe, to be restricted to the artistic contributions of one’s own tongue.

It is not even as simple a matter as that. ‘Translation is an art both estimable and very difficult, and therefore is not the labour and portion of common minds; it should be practiced by those who are themselves capable of being actors, when they see greater use in translating the works of others than in their own works.’ These are the words of Ignacy Krasicki, a Polish poet and multi-lingual translator. Translation must take into account less concrete constraints: context, not just grammar and idiom. More often than not a literal translation will simply fail to do a work any justice. Fidelity and transparency, or fluency, are two qualities to be striven for in a good translation and they are not necessarily compatable. A 17th-century French critic coined the phrase, ‘les belles infidèles,’ to suggest that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful, but not both at the same time.

And what of the cultural transposition to take place for something to hold equivalent weight in its new linguistic setting? Radical translations have placed Sophocles’ Electra in a post-Freudian context to evaluate her isolation and madness, or Macbeth in Nazi Germany to exploit its themes of totalitarianism. In effecting a smooth transition between original and reproduction, the translator’s role is often described as that of a ‘bridge’, transferring and supporting, no less than that of an ‘artist’, creating and innovating.

Dryden, discoursing on then creative scope of the translator, said: ‘When [words] appear… literally graceful, it were an injury to the author that they should be changed. But since… what is beautiful in one [language] is often barbarous, nay sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author’s words.’ As a student of Classics, this vision of the power of a translation appeals to me. A translator must be judicious, insightful, sympathetic, expressive and not to mention flexible.

The very art of translation can provide as much pleasure to an audience as the original, providing an almost dual level of intellectual engagement. The audience is in the power of the translator, who chooses which themes to exaggerate or suppress, which word-plays to reproduce literally and which to invent. It is important for an audience to understand that they are at a second remove from the original, but it is their responsibility to enquire into the calibre and fidelity of the translation. From the opening curtain, they must yield to the art-form of the translation itself and all the richness it can offer.

Spanish homosexual intellectuals (quite a mouthful) certainly do love their women. In recent years, prolific film maker Pedro Almodóvar has delighted audiences with a string of films focusing on the lives of female protagonists, providing an insight into the way women think like no straight man could. If you’ve seen his most recent offering, Volver, for example, you’ll remember how well he captured Penelope Cruz’s character’s awareness of her own breasts as she cleaned a blood-stained-knife at the kitchen sink. Inspired.

With this (the bit about women, not Penelope’s breasts) in mind, a group of us from Merton, relishing any and every opportunity to soak up Oxford’s pseudo-intellectual student theatre scene, set off to see The House of Bernada Alba, a Spanish play with an all female cast by Lorca (another Spanish homosexual – see where I’m going?) performed at the OFS.

Despite having booked the seats a week in advance, we still managed to get that annoying single row of chairs at the top.  After much confusion about which side we were meant to be sat on and a brief spat with an irate Spanish woman (we made her move three times, taking the wise decision to send our Northern Irish friend to negotiate with her), we took our seats, leant our right arms over the banister, and watched the play.

However, during the first half, some of us were left increasingly confused. The audience had been laughing. Laughing? Had they never read Lorca? Had they failed to grasp that wonderfully melodramatic tone that gay Spanish writers capture so well? In fairness, some of the characters were played comically, the maid in particuluar with exaggerated mannerisms and a rather out of place Somerset accent. But still, when a menacing old woman who has locked her daughters away to mourn, for eight draining years, a husband she never really loved shouts, ‘Your only right is to obey me!’, the correct response is icy horror, not roaring laughter!

The audience did manage to grasp the chilling tone in the second half, but not until the final scene, in which the sight of one of the daughters hanging herself was met initially with muted chuckles, which died down as the perpetrators realised that they had completely misunderstood the tone of the whole play.

Oh well, at least it made me feel clever.