A great animator PETER WOOD : SHOW PEOPLE : ARTS

TOM STOPPARD'S Indian Ink, which opens this month, marks the resumption of the longest-running playwright-director partnership on the English stage. After a break for Arcadia, directed by Trevor Nunn, Stoppard is back in harness with Peter Wood, for the eighth time since Jumpers in 1972. It's a relationship which Wood counts as the most precious and fruitful of his working life. That is quite a claim. A Cambridge contemporary of Peter Hall and John Barton, Wood had been directing for over 20 years before Stoppard crossed his path. During that time, he had run the Oxford Playhouse and the Arts Theatre, launched Ionesco in Britain, directed the premieres of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise (the plays which first made their names), and John Whiting's The Devils - which brought Whiting in out of the cold - besides contributing a string of lustrous and long-remembered classical revivals to Hall's RSC and Olivier's National Theatre. You would expect a man with that kind of pedigree, not to mention his membership of the self-promotional Cambridge mafia, to be more public. But, where media attention is concerned, Wood, now 66, has remained faceless. You seldom find him pushing his shows on arts pages or gracing awards ceremonies. Also, since he left the Arts Theatre in the late 1950s, he has never run a building or a company of his own. He is deeply wary of institutions. "I discovered," he says, "that I had a streak of irresponsibility a mile wide, and taking on a theatre would have been very unfair to other people." With many misgivings he succumbed to Peter Hall's persistent cajoleries and had a 10-year spell as associate director at the National Theatre in the 1980s. Otherwise, he has lived the life of a freelance, dividing his time between England, Vienna and Zurich. Invisible off-stage, Wood declares himself with a venge-ance on it. His is the most distinctive presence of any living British director. If a production is his, you don't need a programme to tell you so. He is a great animator: in his hands you see familiar actors achieving a state of fizzing, emotional agility beyond their normal range. The effect does not end with acting. Thanks in part to Wood's operatic experience, you find all the theatrical elements coming together like orchestral instruments; enlarging the play's resonance and making the stage itself seem like the director's keyboard. There is nothing original in the idea of "total theatre", an ideal close to the heart of the lowliest German Intendant. What, again, is peculiar to Wood is his conversion of this earnest Continental tradition into comedy. One typical example came when hesegued Vivaldi's "Gloria" into a chorus of "Why Are We Waiting?" at the start of Jumpers; another (from Stoppard's Hapgood) when he set a pack of spies racing through the locker room, led on, as though by the Pied Piper, by the flute "Badinerie" from Bach's B minor Suite. The stage, Wood says, "is like an elaborate stringed instrument. To find the right music cue with the right movement of scenery and the right inflections of lighting and voice, produces an effect of great beauty. Those are the things that I labour for: those conjunctions of sound, light, and speech that produce Schubertian modulations. Those, really, are what the theatre is." Wood's comic bias is partly a by-product of his love for the great line of Irish prose dramatists - from Congreve to Shaw - who happened to write comedy and for whom, he thinks, nothing is being done. "They need as much training to perform as does Shakespeare. Their language really needs looking after, and nobody's looking after it. The plays are superbly written; but they're in danger of dying from starvation. So, in the end, it's my fascination with verbal music that leads me towards comedy." It was in this spirit that Wood tackled The Birthday Party in 1958. This was the first public sighting of Harold Pinter; and its dominant impact - for all the enigmas and lurking menace - was violently funny. I can still see the lugubrious Richard Pearson, like a monstrously enlarged toddler, beating his toy drum; and Beatrix Lehmann as a hobgoblin landlady skittering on to serve slices of burnt toast like a champagne breakfast. I thought it was marvellous. But Pinter, Wood says, was not pleased. He sawhis work in a grimmer light, and the two did not work together again. Nor did the Shaffer connection last for long; though here the problem was different. "We were a bad influence on each other - too much fun and not enough work." As in the fable of the three bears, Wood found his ideal comic partner in Stoppard, and the reciprocal dance of high-flying ideas and low gags. "He susses things out in my plays," Stoppard once said, "which somehow I've just left to look after themselves." The relationship had got off to a bad start as an arranged marriage set up by Olivier. Wood, brought up a Roman Catholic, had reservations about Jumpers, and asked Stoppard what the play was about: to which the author unhelpfully replied that it was about a man writing a speech. That seemed to be that, but Olivier held them together and they worked their way round the compass from "guarded antagonism" to the creative partnership that stretches over 23 years from Jumpers to Indian Ink. Indian Ink, which follows the life and death of a young woman poet in India at the turn of the 1930s, began as a radio play, In the Native State, on Radio 3 in 1991. A leisurely two-hour script, it was a far cry from Stoppard's previously concise radio plays. It had, he told Wood, "got out of hand. It shouldn't be a radio play at all, because I now find that I'm writing a play about the Raj; and while I wasn't looking it worked its way into being a theatre piece." Wood had followed its development from the first draft and says: "It suits me down to the ground because it allows of a very loose approach to the narrative. The wonderfully generous thing about Stoppard is that he allows me to add. This gets me into frightful trouble with some writers. I shouldn't say this, but I like to have an influence on what happens. I want to order a scene. I want to say how it ends. I seem to like to help. I want to do a bit as well."

Irving Wardle

! `Indian Ink' previews Wed, opens 27 Feb, Aldwych (071-416 6003).