TWO of Britain’s foremost dramatists, Sir Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, are taking part in the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, the international powerhouse of new writing, it was announced yesterday.

Sir Tom, 68, has written his first play for the theatre in which John Osborne inaugurated the “kitchen-sink drama”.

“I want to be part of the Royal Court’s history before I pack it in,” he said. “Some of my best nights of the last 40 years have been spent in the Royal Court’s auditorium. I don’t want to fall under a bus before having a play on its stage.”

Pinter, 75, will star in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, despite recently recovering from radiation treatment for cancer of the oesophagus.

Sir Tom’s new play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, spans the history of Czechoslovakia between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution. It will be directed by Trevor Nunn, who is yet to cast it. Ian Rickson, the Royal Court’s artistic director, described it as “very personal and very ambitious”.

He added: “This play is so fitting for the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court. It takes the history of the Left, the censors, rock music and identity.”

The Royal Court is dedicated to new work by innovative writers from Britain and around the world. Its anniversary programme is to include a production of Osborne’s groundbreaking play Look Back in Anger, which made its debut at the theatre in 1956.

The programme will also look back on plays that challenged the orthodoxy of the day. Writers such as Christopher Hampton, David Hare and Joe Orton, all cut their teeth at the theatre.

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