Wednesday saw the 50th anniversary of one of the great fairy stories of literary success against the odds; perhaps not quite as dramatic as the transformation of Jo Rowling – a cash-strapped trainee teacher and single mother scribbling in Edinburgh cafes – into JK Rowling, queen of the book and film worlds, but pretty close.
In the summer of 1966, Tom Stoppard, 29, had several ideas on the go but was struggling to make ends meet. A BBC World Service project imagining the experiences of an Arab student in London (a strange assignment, as the series was only broadcast abroad, in Arabic) was his sole regular source of income, and he had dashed off a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, mainly because he needed the advance to keep his creditors at bay.
The RSC had optioned a single-act version of a jeu d’esprit about Hamlet’s student friends the previous year, but let the option expire despite his turning it into a three-acter. Other companies, including the Royal Court, showed no interest. So his agent agreed without enthusiasm to its premiere in an amateur production by Oxford undergraduates on the Edinburgh fringe.
Stoppard arrived there to find the director and female lead had walked out, and the rehearsal scripts were full of repetitions and non sequiturs due to mistyping. The stage, in a grim hall on the Royal Mile, was little bigger than “a ping pong table”, he recalled, and the first night audience for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on 24 August 1966 has been variously reported as numbering “seven” or “a couple of dozen”. Scottish reviews were bemused and dismissive – “What’s it all about, Tom?” was one Alfie-echoing headline, and the Scotsman tut-tutted it was a “revue sketch which has got out of hand”.
On a train back to London after this little-seen damp squib, Stoppard opened the Observer - more interested, or so he later claimed, in the reception of his novel, published in the same month - to find his photo alongside acclaim for “the most brilliant debut since John Arden” (initially baffling him, because “I never knew Arden had written a novel”), the words of its critic Ronald Bryden in a three-paragraph rave within an Edinburgh roundup.
Awaiting the playwright at his flat was a telegram prompted by this mini-review from former Observer critic Kenneth Tynan, now literary manager at the nascent National Theatre, requesting a script; and the ensuing 1967 National production was so successful (not to be outdone, the Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson called it British theatre’s “most important event” since Pinter’s emergence, a year before Arden’s) that it went to Broadway, where it ran for a year and won a Tony for best play. Thirty years later, in the summer of 1996, Rowling would learn in Edinburgh that Bloomsbury were going to publish Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, inaugurating a decade-long unfolding of the saga she had dreamt up on a train. But for Stoppard, with a career (like most playwrights’ and novelists’) contrastingly made up of one-off ventures, following up his dazzling debut would prove trickier: five years passed before he returned to the National with Jumpers.
