The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 97

MATCI Wddharn and Chancgnot in Stoppanfs "The Real Inspector and I needed some archetype. And after that, I just hoped for the best The play-to me, anyway looks as though it was carefully plotted, practically on graph paper, but in fact I didn't know who the body was until I got to the moment I had to work out the identity of the corpse. There's a corpse on stage from the beginning. It was an early reminder of soinething very important That it's OK not to know what you're doing fora whfle. And prohabhr better not to know what you're doing, because then the game unfolds according to whafs in your hand, and so you avoid, not always, but you hope to avoid the sense of the play being rather too premeditated.

Shaffer: Had you seen 77k Mousetrap when you wrote it? Stoppard: No. I read it at one point I suppose I thought Yd better read this thing. I suppose I thought Td better go it There was another thing Yd remembered. Do you remember a man called Raul Dehn? He was a critic actually. The News Chronicle.

He wrote a little book of pieces, and one of these pieces took off from a comment by Noel Coward -1 mink it was Noel Coward that if you were ever stuck in a play, have someone come on and offer everyone else a cup of tea. It was mat sort of remark. I haven't got this book any more because I once lent it to Richard Attenborough and never got it back. In 1960,1 flunk. There's a scene in Hound, a completely pointless scene where everyone's offered coffee, milk and sugar.

Anyway, when Michael Codron showed up as a producer looking for half an evening, because he had a play already called 77k Audition, I dug out these half a dozen pages and said yes, I think I can do a comedy about a couple ofcritkswatdtingawhoduniL Haoeyourplaysbeen paired with any otherauthors? Shaffer: No, this is the first time. Only jouffamcd OB pflS 2t Stoppard: Could I say, in parenthesis, what I've said to countless people in the last 33 years-is it? -but never to you as far as I know, which is that BladcComedy is the only time, in a time-span as long as the life of Christ; when Fve ever been envious of another writer's idea. The only time Fve ever felt a moment of envy: oh God, what agreat idea! Shaffer: Tin very delighted. Stoppard: I don't know why mat stops one doing one's own, but it does. You can't say, wefl I'm going to do my own, so sod it I've sometimes wondered whether Alan Ayckboum fdt the way I did, because it would appeal to him enormously.

Shaffer ft would. Did The Radlnspector Hound' also start with a formal idea? Stoppard: I began with the small notion of having two people watching an Agatha Christie kind of thriller and getting involved with it and ending up dead That's all I had. And I wrote mat I had half adozen pages. For some reason in red Biro, which is most unlike me. I remember I kept the coffee-stained red Biro pages for about five years and in l7-after Rosemrrmtz and Guildenstern are Dead was done in London, I think -Michael Codron must have asked me to write a play, or whether I had a play.

And I had hung on to these half a dozen pages because I just Gked the central idea, which, by the way, was very much an idea of that time. It was the fag-end of a period of labels, like Theatre of the Absurd, which I wasn't, and so forth, and the idea of crossing the fourth wall and doing something unconventional with time and space and logic and all that was very much in die air, and that was my tiny contribution. Then, at some pomtlrealised mat life would be a lot easier for me if the two people watching were actually theatre critics. It gave me something to write for them. I was doing parody or pastiche.

12 APRIL 1998 INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 19.