Watch full Clive James interview with Tom Stoppard

His translation of a minor Chekhov work is the critical hit of the year in the West End, he has written a 12-hour epic about 19th-century radical thinkers and his shorter works include plays about quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

However, in an exclusive filmed interview for Times Online, Sir Tom Stoppard maintains that his attitude to theatre is “very, very lowbrow”.

“I think in a way that theatre is essentially a recreation,” he tells Clive James in the first of a series of conversations recorded at the London flat of the Australian writer and broadcaster. “I am very, very lowbrow about it. When I consider what I wish it to do, I wish it to give people a good time on one level or another.”

Stoppard became a journalist at 17 and made his breakthrough as a playwright before he was 30 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a sparkling philosophical comedy about the two bit-part players in Hamlet. A stream of stage hits followed, including Jumpers (1972), Arcadia (1993) and Rock’n’Roll (2006), as well as extensive film work, perhaps most notably with his witty screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which won him an Oscar.

Now the playwright is the toast of the West End for his poignant and frequently hilarious reworking of Ivanov, the supposedly inferior play about a ruined Russian landowner that Chekhov wrote before his great quartet The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

The production, which opened last week and stars Kenneth Branagh in the title role, has been hailed as evidence that “the serious play” can still thrive in the commercial environment of the West End. The one note of criticism was the degree of licence that Stoppard has allowed himself, with Benedict Nightingale, The Times’s theatre critic, referring to Stoppard’s “punchy, witty if overfree translation”.

Stoppard says that a degree of irreverence is integral to his view of theatre. “I have absolutely no compunction about altering plays for the occasion,” he says. “I don’t think of them as being sonnets which go wrong if you change a syllable. On the contrary, what I find exciting and liberating is that [a play] can be different every time it’s done and you can change it because you find yourself on a stage where the actor has too many steps to make before he disappears from view and he needs two more words otherwise the timing goes wrong.”

Stoppard, 71, says that his lack of a university education has dogged him. It meant that he racked up life experience in the field as a journalist in Bristol but “years later I began to really mind the fact that I never really had the three or four years at university, and I still do. It’s a time to read the books that people think I’ve read. I’ve been catching up on that hole in my education ever since.”

The son of Czech Jews who fled to Asia to escape the Nazis, Stoppard says that he finds even the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin more comprehensible than the gulf that has emerged between Western civilisation and radical Islam. “I feel frightened because there isn’t a conversation I can understand. It’s a conversation that’s difficult to hear,” he tells James.

Other guests interviewed in the series include Sir Salman Rushdie, Germaine Greer and Will Self.

There are more conversations with Clive James on this website.

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