It's only Rock 'N' Roll: Tom Stoppard. Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
It's hard to believe Tom Stoppard will be 70 in July. Bumping into him in Leeds a few weeks back at a Pinter conference, I found him as youthfully effervescent as ever. Stoppard's 70th will be celebrated by Radio 3 with a season of his work that will feature Rock 'N' Roll and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I just hope the wireless-wallahs recognise that Stoppard is also one of the great radio dramatists and revive some of his work for the medium.
If I have any minor claim to fame, it is that I was one of the first people to acknowledge Stoppard's talent. Back in 1966, I was asked by Philip French, then a BBC radio producer, to do a 10-minute talk on two short Third Programme plays by a young chap called Stoppard. One, The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, was about a man whose life collapses as he tries to pay an ever-escalating taxi fare. The other, If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, was about a bus driver trying to get through to his wife who is the voice of the speaking clock. It didn't take critical genius to see that both plays were the work of a highly original mind.
Over the years, Stoppard has continued to write some smashing radio plays: Albert's Bridge, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog it Was That Died. To be honest, I much prefer them to an old warhorse like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in which the word games wear thin after a while. The radio plays are debonair conceits that make brilliant use of the medium: I never forget the sound of the marching feet of the 1,799 painters who move in to help the hero of Albert's Bridge and thereby bring the whole edifice tumbling down.
Which prompts a thought. In the 1950s and 60s, many of our best dramatists learned their craft in radio: not just Stoppard but John Mortimer and Harold Pinter. Like Stoppard, they also continued to write for radio after they'd become famous elsewhere. But is this still true today? I confess I don't catch a lot of radio drama these days because, after five nights in the theatre, I'm usually "played out". But I don't get the impression Radio 3 is quite the hotbed of talent it used to be - there's just one 90-minute play on the channel this week.
Yet radio is a fantastic discipline for any writer in that it requires compression and the ability to evoke complete worlds through words alone: I still think Howard Barker's never done anything better than Scenes from an Execution, originally written for radio. So, while I'm glad that Radio 3 is honouring Stoppard, I hope they pay tribute to his work for the medium as well as to his big stage plays.
I also wonder if radio drama, as it did in the golden age when Martin Esslin and John Tydeman ran the show, is doing all it might to discover the next generation of great dramatists. Original TV drama, as we all know, is dead as a dodo. Shouldn't radio be filling the gap?
