Tom Stoppard

One speech [in the play “Dirty Linen”} that gets an unfailing ovation, however, is the following tribute to the American people, paid by a senior British civil servant:

They don’t stand on ceremony. . . . They make no distinction about a man’s background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. . . . They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly good-humoured, ambitious and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I’ve got nothing against them.

from this 1977 New Yorker profile of Tom Stoppard by Kenneth Tynan. I used to buy used copies of Tom Stoppard plays at the Harvard Bookstore, in this way I read Arcadia, Travesties, Invention of Love, a bunch of the other ones, they’re all terrific. Salute to a real one. Since how much money writers make is always of interest:

When I asked him, not long ago, how much he thought he had earned from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” his answer was honestly vague: “About—a hundred and fifty thousand pounds?” To the same question, his agent, Kenneth Ewing, gave me the following reply: “‘Rosencrantz’ opened in London in 1967. Huge overnight success—it stayed in the National Theatre repertory for about four years. The Broadway production ran for a year. Metro bought the screen rights for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and paid Tom a hundred thousand to write the script, though the movie was never made. The play had a short run in Paris, with Delphine Seyrig as Gertrude, but it was quite a hit in Italy, where Rosencrantz was played by a girl. It did enormous business in Germany and Scandinavia and—oddly enough—Japan. On top of that, the book sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the English language alone. Up to now, out of ‘Rosencrantz’ I would guess that Tom had grossed well over three hundred thousand pounds.”

That’s in 1977!