Tom Stoppard is taking a lunch break from the first day's rehearsals for the Irish premiere of Arcadia, which opens next month at the Gate Theatre. There is a ham-and-cheese roll and a pack of cigarettes in front of him. First he cuts the roll in half, then again and again until there is a tiny little piece of roll on the plate which he eats, pushing the plate aside. Then he lights a cigarette, smokes half of it, stubs it out and pulls the plate over once again. It takes him a full hour and at least 10 cigarettes to finish his sandwich. "I'm hungry all the time," he laughs. "And I smoke a lot. I think I suffer from various forms of deprivation."
This finicky absolutism towards his lunch is in direct contrast to his conversation. Commonly regarded as one of the greatest contemporary English playwrights, Stoppard has more than earned the right to pontificate about his art or indulge his own complexities. He chooses not to do so and at times seems charmingly like a novice at the whole interview process. "I realise in interviews that I'm incredibly unaware of myself," he laughs ruefully.
He may be unaware of himself, but there can be few who are unaware of him. His play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead established him as a playwright in 1967 and in many ways mapped out the dramatic concerns of his career. Stoppard nominated the two shadowy courtiers that escort Hamlet to England as his protagonists and through them plays with the concept of destiny and free will. No arid ping-pong game of ideas, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is also a surreally comic creation, full of absurdities that shuttle seamlessly from the Beckettian to the slapstick.
A certain playfulness with characters from literature and history, with plots from other plays and above all, with the forms and confines of language itself became Stoppard's trademarks. Lenin, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, A.E. Housman and the Dada-ist Tristan Tzara have all featured in his plays while plots like that of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in The Real Inspector Hound or The Importance of Being Earnest in Travesties echo like distorted mirrors in a fairground.
He has been accused of being an intellectual elitist whose work can only be comprehended after taking an honours degree; that it is all allusion and no substance, or that he is writing purely to flatter a certain elite who can chummily laugh along with his references to Latin constructions, algebra or literary theory. As one of his characters says in Travesties, "It may be nonsense but at least it's clever nonsense."
They're criticisms he's aware of, but doesn't quite understand: "I don't remember ever leaving something out of a play because somebody may not understand it, and I've certainly never put something into a play because somebody might not understand it. "You'd be making life much, much harder for yourself to write with that kind of cunning and also I don't honestly understand why you'd bother. It's really quite difficult, writing, and the only way you manage at all is to stay absolutely in the middle of your own momentum and your own sense of what's good and what isn't."
He is also a little surprised at the idea that historical figures or indeed any body of arcane knowledge might somehow be starting points in the construction of a play.
"I don't start from that. I always start from something completely abstract, I start from an idea, an intellectual idea. This sounds very grand doesn't it?" He breaks off and laughs, then continues, "The characters - whether they're historical characters or characters from other people's books - come at what is really a second or third stage. They happen when I find the story to contain the things which I want to write about. That seems to me how it is anyway."
The idea for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern came from a conversation with a friend after seeing Peter O'Toole play Hamlet, first in Bristol, then in the National Theatre. "Actually, O'Toole's Hamlet was my first shock of recognition about Shakespeare, because I wasn't a literary schoolboy. I read a great deal, but to this very day, about 80 per cent of what I read is ephemeral. I love newsprint."
With Arcadia, which premiered in London in 1993, the first germ of an idea arrived in the 1980s with Peter Quennell's book on Lord Byron, and with a later fascination with popular works on chaos theory mathematics. "Yet none of those were important as a subject to write a play on until I stumbled across the idea of a play which takes place in one room widely separated between two periods and that's what kicked me off."
Arcadia sees Stoppard at his most accessible without relinquishing any of his usual verbal gymnastics and conceptual acrobatics. In it he conjures up notions before us like wraiths; did Byron flee England because of a duel with a jealous husband? Did the daughter of the house, Thomasina, actually discover the chaos theory in 1809? With two fervent academics on the trail in the present day and a house full of poets, tutors and gardeners in pursuit of love in the Regency period, the scene is set for a perfect Stoppard-ish mixture of comedy, faction and a treatise on the nature of history and inevitability.
His process of finding a story then stitching in the characters and details was recently turned on its head. He was approached by Universal Pictures to work on a film script by Marc Norman. Norman's basic idea was that Shakespeare was originally working on a different play to the Romeo and Juliet we now know, when he fell in love with a society lady forbidden to him, and that the great tragedy of the star-crossed lovers was the result.
The film was Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden (Mrs Brown), and it has already been nominated for six Golden Globe awards, including one for best screenplay for Stoppard and Norman. It is a hugely enjoyable tale that features Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench in a stellar cast, and romps across Elizabethan London and in and out of Shakespeare's plays with great humour. Typical Stoppard touches are there aplenty - crossing a crowded square to get to the theatre the young Will passes a street preacher declaiming "A plague on both their houses", and without missing a beat he takes note of it for future use. A bloodthirsty youngster misses out on a part in Shakespeare's supposed next play, Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter and is found feeding live mice to a cat. "What's your name?" asks Will. "John Webster," he replies.
Initially, Stoppard was not at all keen to return to the works of the Bard. "I had to overcome my resistance because I knew they were thinking `Oh this is something right up Tom's street. Didn't he write something about Shakespeare once?' But in fact I quite enjoyed it and in the end I enjoyed it very much."
It is not the first screenplay he has written - as well as the screenplay for the film version of his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (which he also directed), there have been writing credits on films such as Billy Bathgate, Empire of the Sun, and Brazil. For him it is a hugely different craft to that of writing plays for the stage. "It's what I do when I'm not writing plays because it's almost the opposite of what's happening in this theatre, for example. In this building all these people are attempting to serve the text. In the movies, the writer is there to serve the director."
One of the most surprising things about this most English of playwrights is that he was not born English at all. The son of Eugene and Martha Straussler, he was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia on July 3rd, 1937. Two years later the family had to flee the Nazis (Stoppard's father and mother were Jewish) and were re-located in Singapore by his father's firm, Bata shoe manufacturers. A short time later they were on the move again, this time fleeing the Japanese invasion of Singapore.
Stoppard, his brother and his mother were put on a ship for women and children that was originally bound for Australia but ended up in India. His father remained behind and was killed, a fact the family only learnt after the war had ended. Martha worked for Bata until she married army officer, Kenneth Stoppard, when the family moved to England. Eight-year-old Tomas took his stepfather's name, became Tom Stoppard and was turned into "a proper little English schoolboy".
He says he suffered little or no culture shock with the move, apart from feeling freezing cold. "I think we were quite proud of being slightly exotic among the other boys. There wasn't much of a culture shock because the only education I had was in English in mixed race schools. I seemed to take to England very quickly - I adopted England and England adopted me. I felt English from very early on."
Neither does he feel that this "otherness" at an early age in any way influenced his approach to the language he uses to such great effect, although the similarities with Joseph Conrad, also a virtuoso with language and also "not English" are notable. "I suppose everything is part of the picture, but I never think of it as being an important part. I'm only guessing, but I think that if we'd gone back to Czechoslovakia after the war I would have been exactly the same about language, only it would have been Czech."
In fact he jokes that the two things journalists most frequently misjudge about Tom Stoppard are that he has a huge interest in all things Czech and that he plays a lot of cricket (he used to,but has not played for 20 years; he's a fly-fishing man now). The other area which has caused confusion in the press is that of the women in his life.
He has been married twice, first to Jose Ingle in 1965, a marriage that produced two sons and ended in 1972. His second marriage was to Dr Miriam Stoppard (nee Moore-Robinson), health expert and agony aunt; they also had two sons, and separated in the late 1980s. "It was such a gradual process, it's hard to put a date on it." When they got divorced in 1992 it was amicable - she has said since that "It was a hugely successful marriage and I can't think of it in any way as a failure."
The next woman in his life was the actress Felicity Kendal who has appeared in Stoppard plays so frequently as to be dubbed his muse. They separated 18 months ago, but Stoppard says he is quite used to opening the newspaper to read anew that they are no longer together. "I never demand corrections. I quite like it really. If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true." It is a statement that could have come straight out of one of his plays.
What he does find annoying is being asked, as he frequently is, to supply sound-bites on anything from Pinochet to the Gulf War. "I'm sure everyone has an opinion but they're usually things I know nothing about and am not qualified to give an opinion on, so why should it be interesting to hear what I have to say?"
When he does feel qualified to comment he has in the past given more than a sound-bite. He was vocal on behalf of Russian Jews who were being interned in asylums because they were dissidents rather than because of mental ill health, and he has visited Eastern Europe many times. It was a cause he says he took up as part of the process of discovering his own relations in Czechoslovakia and his mother's Jewishness. "Afterwards I was contacted by many people and thanked for speaking out as a Jew, but to be honest I've never felt I was one."
Politically, he describes himself as "Boringly central. Generally though, I think that when people talk about beliefs they really mean temperament and I think I've got a fairly conservative temperament". As regards New Labour and its performance, he laughs, "I think that as ever I seem to have a view that is so close to the prevailing one that I suspect that it's not mine at all. I suspect that I merely collude with the prevailing orthodoxy at present which is that they've f**ked up."
He deplores the lack of funding to the arts in Britain, but understands the thinking that would see it as a luxury too. "I was brought up in a family that really felt that artists are getting away with something and the fact of the matter is, I think I believe that too. I feel that we're all getting away with something and my posture is slightly apologetic too."
Now Stoppard is reading around the subject of 19th-century Russian literature and thinks there is quite possibly a play in it. "I'm interested in the fact that in a suppressed society, the artist is more important than in a free society, more attention is paid to the artist and so forth. Plays come from different sources, usually - always I would say. There's more than one origin to a play. I used to be very coy about telling people what I was working on, but it began to embarrass me. Now I tend to tell people that don't even want to know."
Arcadia opens at the Gate Theatre on February 16th. Shakespeare in Love is on general release from January 29th.