The playwright Tom Stoppard has won the David Cohen prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature, hailed as a “giant of 20th-century British drama” with an “outstanding and enduring body of unfailingly creative, innovative and brilliant work”.
On hearing the news, Stoppard, who is 80, said: “Winning a lifetime achievement award, one’s first thought is: ‘Surely not yet.’ And one’s second is: ‘Just in time, mate’ … Quite frankly, it has always meant a lot to me, the idea that one is writing for the future as well. I’m never convinced it will work out that way. We still don’t know in the long run, it’s impossible to say. History is full of the names of writers who at one time seemed to be permanently established and who slowly disappeared from view. I’ll absolutely own up to writing for the present and for posterity – but as Lytton Strachey said: ‘What has posterity ever done for me?’”
The author of plays including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – which made him the youngest dramatist ever to have a play performed at the National Theatre, aged 29 – Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia and The Real Thing, Stoppard has enjoyed an equally lauded career as a writer for television, radio and film, topped by winning the Oscar for best original screenplay in 1999 with Shakespeare in Love. For the David Cohen prize’s chair of judges, Mark Lawson, Stoppard’s writing is “built on foundations of electrifying dialogue, vivid stage pictures, literary and historical perception and roles that allow actors unusual verbal and emotional scope”.
The prize’s organisers said that it was the “extraordinary range” of Stoppard’s writing, “from metaphysics and quantum mechanics to moral philosophy and moon landings, the pain of adultery and the excitement of love, linguistics and philosophy”, that made him an “overwhelming choice” for the £40,000 biennial award.
According to Lawson’s fellow judge Simon James, Stoppard is “one of our very finest dramatists, if not the finest dramatist, who has created an outstanding and enduring body of unfailingly creative, innovative and brilliant work”, while Kate Bassett, also on the panel, said that the playwright was “almost impishly intelligent, wittily experimental with overarching structures at the same time as being, close up, a crafter of exquisite phrases”.
“That’s one for the gravestone,” said Stoppard. “I feel a bit bashful … this is a very highly valued prize to receive, and a huge compliment.” Founded in 1992, the award’s winners include three writers who went on to take the Nobel prize in literature – Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and VS Naipaul – as well as Tony Harrison, Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney and Hilary Mantel. “This is some company to be in,” said Stoppard.
Stoppard, whose trophy cabinet also features five Tony awards for best play, the Critics’ Circle award for distinguished service to the arts, and the America award in literature, said he was currently trying to write a new play, but that the state of the world today was making it difficult.
“I’m trying to be [inspired by current events]. But my brain turns to white noise as I contemplate the way these important things ought to be written about,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that for one reason or other, it’s only very recently that I’ve got to the point where I’m free to write a play. And I’m trying to write one … It’s definitely a challenge. These things are in your face, and one feels, in a certain way, that if one doesn’t confront and engage with them, at least pick one of them, that one has a sense of shirking something. But the trouble is, creativity doesn’t work like that. The thing that in the end sparks you, gives you the electricity and the juice you need to write a play, isn’t necessarily coming from the headlines you’d like it to come from. It’s a tough one.”