Contributor: Tom Stoppard

Bio Note: Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE, is a noted British playwright and film writer.

Author: James Saunders

Work: Next Time I’ll Sing To You

I would like to nominate Next Time I'll Sing To You by James Saunders. The first reason is that it is not as well known as it ought to be, but I also have a personal reason. It was one of the very few new plays which excited me when I was starting out as a playwright. The idiosyncratic mixture of seriousness and comedy, poetical writing and jokes, biography and anti-biography, self-awareness and unawareness—all in all, theatricality—pointed to the kind of theatre which at that moment fitted my taste and temperament. I have never seen the play since (it was 1962, I think) and I don't think it has had a major new production.