Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for television, radio, film, and stage, finding prominence with plays such as "Arcadia", "The Coast of Utopia", "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour", "Professional Foul", "The Real Thing", "Travesties", "The Invention of Love", and "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead".
He co-wrote the screenplays for "Brazil", "The Russia House", and "Shakespeare in Love", and has received an Academy Award, an Olivier and four Tony Awards. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. In 2008, "The Daily Telegraph" ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the three years prior (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
It was announced in June 2019 that he had written a new play, "Leopoldstadt", set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre with Patrick Marber directing. In October 2020, it won the Olivier Award for Best New Play.
Life and career.
Early years.
Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Sträussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. His parents were non-observant Jews, members of a long-established community. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Jan Antonín Baťa, transferred his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Europe. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler, family fled to Singapore, where Baťa had a factory.
Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to India. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that, as a doctor, he would be needed in its defence. Stoppard was four years old when his father died. In the book "Tom Stoppard in Conversation", Stoppard tells how his father died in Japanese captivity, a prisoner of war but has said that he subsequently discovered that Sträussler was reported to have drowned on board a ship bombed by Japanese forces, whilst trying to flee Singapore in 1942.
In 1941, when Tomáš was five, the three were evacuated to Darjeeling, India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial school, where Tomáš became Tom and his brother Petr became Peter.
In 1945, his mother, Martha, married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and, in 1946, moved the family to England. Stoppard's stepfather believed strongly that "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life"—a quote from Cecil Rhodes—telling his 9-year-old stepson: "Don't you realise that I made you British?" setting up Stoppard's desire as a child to become "an honorary Englishman". "I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in", he says. "I find I put a foot wrong—it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history—and suddenly I'm there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket." This is reflected in his characters, he notes, who are "constantly being addressed by the wrong name, with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names". Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later completed his education at Pocklington School in East Riding, Yorkshire, which he hated.
Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for the "Western Daily Press" in Bristol, never receiving a university education. Years later, he came to regret not going to university, but at the time he loved his work as a journalist and felt passionately about his career. He worked at the paper from 1954 until 1958, when the "Bristol Evening World" offered Stoppard the position of feature writer, humour columnist, and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theatre. At the Bristol Old Vic, at the time a well-regarded regional repertory company, Stoppard formed friendships with director John Boorman and actor Peter O'Toole early in their careers. In Bristol, he became known more for his strained attempts at humour and unstylish clothes than for his writing.
Career.
Stoppard wrote short radio plays in 1953–54 and by 1960 he had completed his first stage play, "A Walk on the Water", which was later re-titled "Enter a Free Man" (1968).
He noted that the work owed much to Robert Bolt's "Flowering Cherry" and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". Within a week after sending "A Walk on the Water" to an agent, Stoppard received his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives." His first play was optioned, staged in Hamburg, then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963. From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for "Scene" magazine, writing reviews and interviews both under his name and the pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop"). In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear", which later evolved into his Tony-winning play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead".
In the following years, Stoppard produced several works for radio, television and the theatre, including ""M" is for Moon Among Other Things" (1964), "A Separate Peace" (1966) and "If You're Glad I'll Be Frank" (1966). On 11 April 1967 – following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival – the opening of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" in a National Theatre production at the Old Vic made Stoppard an overnight success. "Jumpers" (1972) places a professor of moral philosophy in a murder mystery thriller alongside a slew of radical gymnasts. "Travesties" (1974) explored the 'Wildean' possibilities arising from the fact that Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara had all been in Zürich during the First World War.
"Arcadia" (1993) explores the interaction between two modern academics and the residents of a Derbyshire country house in the early 19th century, including aristocrats, tutors and the fleeting presence, unseen on stage, of Lord Byron. The themes of the play include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design.
"The Coast of Utopia" (2002) was a trilogy of plays Stoppard wrote about the philosophical arguments among Russian revolutionary figures in the late 19th century. The trilogy comprises "Voyage", "Shipwreck", and "Salvage". Major figures in the play include Michael Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev and Alexander Herzen.
"Rock'n'Roll" (2006) was set in both Cambridge, England and Prague. The play explored the culture of 1960s rock music, especially the persona of Syd Barrett and the political challenge of the Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe, mirroring the contrast between liberal society in England and the repressive Czech state after the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Prague Spring.
In his early years, Stoppard wrote extensively for BBC radio, often introducing surrealist themes. He has also adapted many of his stage works for radio, film and television winning extensive awards and honours from the start of his career. His radio production, "Darkside" (2013), was written for BBC Radio 2 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's album, "The Dark Side of the Moon".
Stoppard has written one novel, "Lord Malquist and Mr Moon" (1966), set in contemporary London. Its cast includes the 18th-century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, and also cowboys, a lion (banned from the Ritz) and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ.
In the 1980s, in addition to writing his own works, Stoppard translated many plays into English, including works by Sławomir Mrożek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, and Václav Havel. It was at this time that Stoppard became influenced by the works of Polish and Czech absurdists. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group, a far-from-serious French movement to improve actors' stage technique through science.
Stoppard has also co-written screenplays including "Shakespeare in Love" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". Steven Spielberg states that though Stoppard was uncredited for the latter, "he was responsible for almost every line of dialogue in the film". Stoppard also worked on "", though again Stoppard received no official or formal credit in this role. He worked in a similar capacity with Tim Burton on his film "Sleepy Hollow".
Stoppard serves on the advisory board of the magazine "Standpoint", and was instrumental in its foundation, giving the opening speech at its launch. He is also a patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that enables school children across the UK to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres.
In July 2013 Stoppard was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for "determination to tell things as they are."
Stoppard was appointed president of the London Library in 2002 and Vice-President in 2017 following the election of Sir Tim Rice as president.
In July 2017, Stoppard was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy (HonFBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Stoppard was appointed Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, St Catherine's College, Oxford, for the academic year 2017–2018.
Themes.
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1966–67) was Stoppard's first major play to gain recognition. The story of "Hamlet" as told from the viewpoint of two courtiers echoes Beckett in its double act repartee, existential themes and language play. "Stoppardian" became a term describing works using wit and comedy while addressing philosophical concepts. Critic Dennis Kennedy notes "It established several characteristics of Stoppard's dramaturgy: his word-playing intellectuality, audacious, paradoxical, and self-conscious theatricality, and preference for reworking pre-existing narratives... Stoppard's plays have been sometimes dismissed as pieces of clever showmanship, lacking in substance, social commitment, or emotional weight. His theatrical surfaces serve to conceal rather than reveal their author's views, and his fondness for towers of paradox spirals away from social comment. This is seen most clearly in his comedies "The Real Inspector Hound" (1968) and "After Magritte" (1970), which create their humour through highly formal devices of reframing and juxtaposition." Stoppard himself went so far as to declare "I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness." He acknowledges that he started off "as a language nerd", primarily enjoying linguistic and ideological playfulness, feeling early in his career that journalism was far better suited for presaging political change, than playwriting.
The accusations of favouring intellectuality over political commitment or commentary were met with a change of tack, as Stoppard produced increasingly socially engaged work. From 1977, he became personally involved with human-rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe. In February 1977, he visited the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries with a member of Amnesty International. In June, Stoppard met Vladimir Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met dissident playwright and future president Václav Havel, whose writing he greatly admires. Stoppard became involved with "Index on Censorship", Amnesty International, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human rights. He was instrumental in translating Havel's works into English. "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" (1977), "a play for actors and orchestra" was based on a request by conductor/composer André Previn; inspired by a meeting with a Russian exile. This play as well as "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth" (1979), "The Coast of Utopia" (2002), "Rock 'n' Roll" (2006), and two works for television "Professional Foul" (1977) and "Squaring the Circle" (1984) all concern themes of censorship, rights abuses, and state repression.
Stoppard's later works have sought greater inter-personal depths, whilst maintaining their intellectual playfulness. Stoppard acknowledges that around 1982 he moved away from the "argumentative" works and more towards plays of the heart, as he became "less shy" about emotional openness. Discussing the later integration of heart and mind in his work, he commented "I think I was too concerned when I set off, to have a firework go off every few seconds... I think I was always looking for the entertainer in myself and I seem to be able to entertain through manipulating language... [but] it's really about human beings, it's not really about language at all." "The Real Thing" (1982) uses a meta-theatrical structure to explore the suffering that adultery can produce and "The Invention of Love" (1997) also investigates the pain of passion. "Arcadia" (1993) explores the meeting of chaos theory, historiography, and landscape gardening. He was inspired by a Trevor Nunn production of Gorky's "Summerfolk" to write a trilogy of "human" plays: "The Coast of Utopia" ("Voyage", "Shipwreck", and "Salvage", 2002).
Stoppard has commented that he loves the medium of theatre for how 'adjustable' it is at every point, how unfrozen it is, continuously growing and developing through each rehearsal, free from the text. His experience of writing for film is similar, offering the liberating opportunity to 'play God', in control of creative reality. It often takes four to five years from the first idea of a play to staging, taking pains to be as profoundly accurate in his research as he can be.
Personal life.
Stoppard has been married three times. His first marriage was to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse; his second marriage was to Miriam Stern (1972–92). They separated when he began a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He also had a relationship with actress Sinéad Cusack, but she made it clear she wished to remain married to Jeremy Irons and stay close to their two sons. Also, after she was reunited with a son she had given up for adoption, she wished to spend time with him in Dublin rather than with Stoppard in the house they shared in France. He has two sons from each of his first two marriages: Oliver Stoppard, Barnaby Stoppard, the actor Ed Stoppard, and Will Stoppard, who is married to violinist Linzi Stoppard. In 2014 he married Sabrina Guinness.
Stoppard's mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters.
In 1998, following the deaths of his parents, he returned to Zlín for the first time in over 50 years. He has expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past, but he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."
In 2013, Stoppard asked Hermione Lee to write his biography. It appeared in 2020.
Political views.
In 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, Stoppard noted to Paul Delaney: "I'm a conservative with a small c. I am a conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre." In 2007, Stoppard described himself as a "timid libertarian".
The Tom Stoppard Prize () was created in 1983 under the Charter 77 Foundation and is awarded to authors of Czech origin.
With Kevin Spacey, Jude Law and others, Stoppard joined protests against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in March 2011, showing their support for the Belarusian democracy movement.
In 2014, Stoppard publicly backed "Hacked Off" and its campaign towards press self-regulation by "safeguarding the press from political interference while also giving vital protection to the vulnerable."
Representations in art.
Stoppard sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill, and a bronze head is now in public collection, situated with the Stoppard papers in the reading room of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The terracotta remains in the collection of the artist in London. The correspondence file relating to the Stoppard bust is held in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
Stoppard also sat for the sculptor and friend Angela Conner, and his bronze portrait bust is on display in the grounds of Chatsworth House.
Archive.
The papers of Tom Stoppard are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The archive was first established by Stoppard in 1991 and continues to grow. The collection consists of typescript and handwritten drafts, revision pages, outlines, and notes; production material, including cast lists, set drawings, schedules, and photographs; theatre programs; posters; advertisements; clippings; page and galley proofs; dust jackets; correspondence; legal documents and financial papers, including passports, contracts, and royalty and account statements; itineraries; appointment books and diary sheets; photographs; sheet music; sound recordings; a scrapbook; artwork; minutes of meetings; and publications.