Tom Stoppard's heart is an elusive organ. Critics have long scanned his plays for clues about its working. Surely, the sheer cleverness of his writing suggests a mind fixed far above the messiness of emotion?

Last week, as Stoppard accepted the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, he proved those critics wrong with a talk that brought many in his 600-strong Oxford audience to tears - including a woman he'd last seen more than 65 years ago, when both were children in Darjeeling. “You were the matron's daughter. My first love!” he cried with delight as she introduced herself. In conversation with Sunday Times fiction editor Peter Kemp, he looked regretfully back on the shyness of his youth, confessed to striking a red pen through his writing day after day and offered a series of rare insights into the shaping of his work.

First, he took on the clever Tom image: “When things go well for a play, you never ever, ever, feel clever. You always feel lucky.” As for the creative process: “I don't think I have ever written a play in which the first line has been left unchanged nor one in which the last line has needed to be altered.”

Curiously, when translating the plays of others - Chekhov, for example - he is constantly fooled into thinking his job is done, when it never is. “You go to bed thinking, ‘Well done ...good old Tom, that was really good, go to bed.' You wake up and you look at it and it's as though the Polish au pair girl has rewritten it in the night. You think, ‘For God's sake!' I mean... none of it is right.. .”

Increasingly, he is guided when he writes and rewrites, he said, by the need to keep the audience “poised at a precise point of comprehension which is neither over-comprehension nor under-comprehension”.

“Perhaps because I began going to theatre in church halls, amateur drama, for me the event involves everybody in the tent,” he said. “It's no good saying ‘Well, you didn't get it, bad luck.'”

Quizzed about the dazzlingly clever wordplay of one of his earliest works, Dogg's Hamlet, he said ruefully: “It was quite clever, quite witty, but it wasn't moving. Everything was there except a beating heart, and this is why I don't think I'll ever do anything like that again. It's a young man's game. A shy man's game. And I'm not shy any more the way I used to be.”

In his most recent play, Rock'n'Roll, he said, he initially brought together a cluster of clever ideas - the Warsaw Pact, Sappho, brain science - only to find that a simple love story eventually robbed him of authorial control.

“I wanted [the play] to go on for an extra scene. But the moment this man and woman declared their love for each other and got together, the play had absolutely no interest in my agenda, none whatsoever. The play was just basically saying, ‘No, no. We've done it now. It's over,'” he said, momentarily rueful. “And the reason it was over was because of love.”SH

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