Last week I went to the Old Vic to see the new production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. The Old Vic’s played a big part in my life. I used to visit it regularly as a teenager to see the National Theatre that had its first theatrical home there. I remember vividly seeing Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith in The Recruiting Officer.
Then, many years on, under Kevin Spacey’s direction, I was lucky enough to work on the Old Vic brand. Now I visit it very happily again as a member of the audience and watch Toby Stephens, son of Robert and Maggie. Stoppard’s play is, as always, clever, witty and thought-provoking. It’s about honesty and deception in relationships and also about the writer’s role as a recorder and interpreter of reality. The story draws on Stoppard’s own life and is also uncannily prescient of it. Felicity Kendal and Tom Stoppard married after she appeared in the first production, life imitating art.
The play makes you laugh and think. So does the programme, which had a spread on “Writers on writing”. Writing – whether it’s a play or a company website – draws on the writer’s own experience and personality. But, Stoppard says, “The writing instinct doesn’t come out of self-examination….You can’t help being what you write and writing what you are.”
There were other interesting quotes by writers in the programme, which can help each of us think about our own writing practice.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov
That relates to what I was writing in last week’s blog. Don’t shout at me that your product’s fantastic – describe it so that I understand why it’s fantastic and can draw the conclusion you want.
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson
We all complain “if we had time”. And it’s true, we don’t. But we still owe it to ourselves, as well as to our clients, to try to find the word that will shine. It might be the word that defines a brand and opens up a whole world.
The final quote comes from Diana Athill, a brilliant editor in her career who found late success as a writer. Here’s something we all need to think about, every time we write:
“You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)”
Tom Stoppard’s sheer exuberance with language was one of the things that most excited and inspired me when I was in my early twenties. I remember going to the Royal Court to see Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Real Inspector Hound, and thinking: if you can have this much fun with words, it’s definitely what I want to do. And I agree with him – self-examination comes out of writing, not the other way round.