As Tom Stoppard tells it, he was lazing in the water off Capri when suddenly he realized he was twenty-three, unpublished, unheard-of, and unlikely to be otherwise. At the end of that vacation, he turned his cards in at Bristol's Evening World, where he had worked for two years as feature writer and second-string arts critic, and, armed with their contract for a twice-weekly column, headed metaphorically for deeper waters. The image is teasingly appropriate. His early work, before the success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, shows him testing his energies, looking for a distinctive style that would allow him, like George Riley, the determined fantasist of his first play, “a walk on the water”

So Stoppard did not burst upon the world like Athene from the head of Zeus; he might not even have become a playwright. Although he has said that young writers in the early sixties thought of the stage as the route to success after John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and the “new” drama that followed, Stoppard in those years also tried his hand at radio and television scripts, theatre criticism, short stories, and a novel. If his experience as a journalist, reviewing plays at the Bristol Old Vic, had given him a taste for “showbiz”, as a freelance writer he was prepared to slog away at such assignments as a season's worth of weekly episodes for A Student's Diary on the BBC Overseas Service; these were to depict the day-to-day life of an Arab student in London (though he did not actually know any such student at the time).