Tom Stoppard interviewed at the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER
What actually led you to write plays? Could you describe the genesis of your plays other than Hapgood and Jumpers?
STOPPARD
I started writing plays because everybody else was doing it at the time. As for the genesis of plays, it is never the story. The story comes just about last. I’m not sure I can generalize. The genesis of Travesties was simply the information that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin were all in Zurich at the same time. Anybody can see that there was some kind of play in that. But what play? I started to read Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce, and came across Henry Carr, and so on and so on. In the case of Night and Day, it was merely that I had been a reporter, that I knew quite a lot about journalism, and that I should have been writing another play about something and that therefore it was probably a good idea to write a play about journalists. After that, it was just a case of shuffling around my bits of knowledge and my prejudices until they began to suggest some kind of story. I was also shuffling a separate pack of cards that had to do with sexual attraction. Quite soon I started trying to integrate the two packs. And so on.
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