Tom Stoppard interview

In The Guardian, Maya Jaggi talks to Guild member Tom Stoppard about his new adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov and his long writing career. The interview concludes with an extract from Stoppard's introduction to The Real Inspector Hound.

After 40 years, the problem remains, each time. You can't start writing until you know what you're doing, and you don't know what you're doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out well, you shouldn't feel clever, you should feel lucky.

Ivanov opens at the Wyndam's Theatre on 12 September.