You have to.Stoppard: It’s built in, isn’t it? I’m trying to remember if there’s a plot reason for that.Shaffer: There is a plot reason. Or whether Strindberg is actually a much better idea to go in front of Black Comedy.Do these two plays strike you as period pieces?Stoppard: In a particular sense I think of mine as a play I wouldn’t write now So it’s a period piece in my life I suppose these plays belong in some different decade. I’m not sure you would wish to set the play- within-the-play as something happening in 1998. [He later remembers it was 1985.]Shaffer: It would be nice, if people found this an agreeable combination, if they were paired together.Stoppard: We’re quite interested to find out whether comedy plus comedy is actually that good an idea. I suppose Hound is done with other plays, but I don’t know what they are.Shaffer: Well, wasn’t it done at the National?Stoppard: Oh, that’s right I’d forgotten that.

I should have remembered that because I directed it.Shaffer: That was with The Critic by Sheridan.Stoppard: I’m getting ancient, aren’t I? Of course, it was so long ago, six, seven years ago. I did write an even shorter play, an extended sketch called After Magritte, which is done with Hound now and again. Only Strindberg and Tom.Stoppard: I don’t know the answer to that question. Anyway, when Michael Codron showed up as a producer looking for half an evening, because he had a play already called The Audition, I dug out these half a dozen pages and said yes, I think I can do a comedy about a couple of critics watching a whodunit.Have your plays been paired with any other authors?Shaffer: No, this is the first time.

I haven’t got this book any more because I once lent it to Richard Attenborough and never got it back In 1960, I think. There’s a scene in Hound, a completely pointless scene where everyone’s offered coffee, milk and sugar. I suppose I thought I’d better go and see it, but I’m fairly lazy, and so I read it There was another thing I’d remembered. Do you remember a man called Paul Dehn? He was a critic actually The News Chronicle.

He wrote a little book of pieces, and one of these pieces took off from a comment by Noel Coward – I think it was Noel Coward – that if you were ever stuck in a play, have someone come on and offer everyone else a cup of tea It was that sort of remark. The play – to me, anyway – looks as though it was carefully plotted, practically on graph paper, but in fact I didn’t know who the body was until I got to the moment I had to work out the identity of the corpse There’s a corpse on stage from the beginning It was an early reminder of something very important That it’s OK not to know what you’re doing for a while. And probably better not to know what you’re doing, because then the game unfolds according to what’s in your hand, and so you avoid, not always, but you hope to avoid the sense of the play being rather too premeditated.Shaffer: Had you seen The Mousetrap when you wrote it?Stoppard: No I read it at one point I suppose I thought I’d better read this thing. And I had hung on to these half a dozen pages because I just liked the central idea, which, by the way, was very much an idea of that time.

It was the fag-end of a period of labels, like Theatre of the Absurd, which I wasn’t, and so forth, and the idea of crossing the fourth wall and doing something unconventional with time and space and logic and all that was very much in the air, and that was my tiny contribution.Then, at some point, I realised that life would be a lot easier for me if the two people watching were actually theatre critics It gave me something to write for them I was doing parody or pastiche, and I needed some archetype And after that, I just hoped for the best. I remember I kept the coffee-stained red Biro pages for about five years and – in 1967 – after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was done in London, I think – Michael Codron must have asked me to write a play, or whether I had a play. I’ve sometimes wondered whether Alan Ayckbourn felt the way I did, because it would appeal to him enormously.Shaffer: It would.Did ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ also start with a formal idea?Stoppard: I began with the small notion of having two people watching an Agatha Christie kind of thriller and getting involved with it and ending up dead That’s all I had And I wrote that I had half a dozen pages For some reason in red Biro, which is most unlike me. That’s right.Stoppard: Could I say, in parenthesis, what I’ve said to countless people in the last 33 years – is it? – but never to you as far as I know, which is that Black Comedy is the only time, in a time-span as long as the life of Christ, when I’ve ever been envious of another writer’s idea.