After watching schoolchildren performing Shakespeare in a charity presentation at No 10 Downing Street, Tom Stoppard asked: “How can I contribute?”
When told that “We have 12 abridged plays, but schools keep asking for The Merchant of Venice”, there was a pause, and he said: “Give me a year and I will do that. There will be no fee.”
A year later we met and Tom handed over a seamless, to me, 40-minute abridgement.
“How did you go about it?’
“Over a week in France; I went down to the bottom and then came back up again.”
More than 20 years have passed, and Tom’s abridgement has now been performed, and is still being performed, by many hundreds of schools and thousands upon thousands of children.
