Suspicions …

… The TLS blog: Tom Stoppard, to the life. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

That led to a story about something that happened the day beforeTravesties opened for the first time. One of the characters had a monologue that lasted about ten minutes, but the actress had a bad throat, so they used only the first paragraph, and Stoppard discovered that he preferred it that way. When the play was later rehearsed in French for the first time, the director rejected Stoppard’s suggestion that the monologue be cut in the French too – “Oh, no no! C’est magnifique!” – and reported, once the play had opened, that it had gone down extremely well (“Incroyable! Parfait!”). Stoppard went to see it for himself, and found that “it was exactly as he said – she did the entire speech; you could have heard a pin drop – but he never actually mentioned that she was naked”.