Dramatist Stoppard says next play ‘may be my last’

PARIS (AFP) ― Tom Stoppard could call an end to his illustrious career as one of Britain’s leading playwrights, he revealed on Saturday, saying he was considering writing just one more play.

“I might write one more play and give up because I am very slow...,” he told reporters at Paris’s Forum des Images cinema.

“I am 75, I am 76 in a minute ... My brain cells are dying in their trillions,” he said, adding that he had started work on a new stage play.

Stoppard, in addition to his critically acclaimed work for the stage, has written prolifically for television, film and radio, winning an Oscar with Marc Norman for the screenplay of “Shakespeare in Love.”

Other recent film work includes the screenplay for Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” starring Keira Knightley.

But he said he was increasingly weighing up whether to continue writing for the theater, although a sense of defiance in the face of his own mortality might yet propel him on.

“When I was 20 the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams ... I ended up having quite a few of them on but it never stopped feeling like the thing that I ought to do and would want to do,” he said.

“I don’t think I would be in disgrace if I stopped and started reading and maybe doing adaptations but I think there is something discreditable in furtive competitiveness. I think I am not dead yet!” he added.

Stoppard was in Paris for a screening of “Parade’s End,” the BBC/HBO television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s series of novels for which he wrote the screenplay.