Faber reprinted the text 23 times in the next 30 years, going on to sell a further half a million copies between 2001 and 2008 alone. The blood-line of Stoppard’s early hits might be described as “out of Beckett by The Goon Show”, though “Pinter meets Beyond the Fringe” catches something, too. Other plays followed, roughly every four or five years. Sitting outside on a freezing cold day, a recognisable Stoppard was working on the script of The Hard Problem (then in rehearsal) with intense concentration, exhaling clouds from an endless stream of cigarettes. And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie. Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. Buy Tom Stoppard: A Life Main by Lee, Professor Dame Hermione (ISBN: 9780571314430) from Amazon's Book Store. (We learn, interestingly, that he thinks the former is possibly his best play but the latter is his favourite, though that view may have pre-dated the writing of Leopoldstadt.). Running time: 60 minutes Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer “I simply don’t like revealing myself,” Tom Stoppard once said. When Hitler invaded in March 1939, the Sträusslers and other professional-class Jewish families (his father was a doctor) were advised to leave as soon as possible. Sign up to the Irish Times books newsletter for features, podcasts and more, For the best site experience please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Sinéad Cusack made it clear from the start that she intended staying married to Jeremy Irons and close to their two sons. The pandemic is not the first time Stoppard has confronted global disaster. Tom Stoppard has written some of the most important plays of the past 50 years. Hermione Lee’s biography of Tom Stoppard is an “astute and unfailingly clear” commentary on the playwright’s life and work. Stoppard has given us wonderful nights out in the theatre, occasions that make us think as well as laugh (and sometimes cry). Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. In December 2014 my wife and I glimpsed him as we passed London’s National Theatre. Stoppard went on to lengthy relationships with two actresses. The boys went to school in Derbyshire, and “Tom”, identifying passionately with his new country, grew up an Englishman, playing cricket and playing the part. Stoppard may not have gone to university, but he remained a scholar in his own creative way when it came to preparing a play. Hermione Lee has written an authorized biography of playwright, screenwriter, translator, and man of letters Tom Stoppard, called Tom Stoppard: A Life.It was released in the United Kingdom on October 1st and should appear in the United States on February 23, 2021. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. There have also been repeated grumbles that his are the kinds of play you can only see once. He was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish doctor and his wife. Perhaps that’s more than enough: what higher praise could a playwright want? Marta told her sons very little about the family background and the circumstances of their flight from Czechoslovakia; Stoppard was in his late 50s before he fully understood that he was Jewish and that many of his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis. In a sense, though, those are its strengths. Lee's biography is full of Stoppard's voice, humour and thoughts about life: there's a Stoppard joke on almost every page. Her attentive exposition of the themes and intricate plot of Arcadia is almost worth the price of admission by itself; Stoppard has often been criticised for being “heartless” or too purely “cerebral”, but it is one of Lee’s several literary-critical triumphs to identify the emotions that drive so much of his work, especially his middle-period masterpieces such as Arcadia and The Invention of Love. Declan Kiberd remembers the playwright calling on Prof Richard Ellmann in his Oxford rooms in the 1970s to discuss Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, which provided the foundational story of 1974’s Travesties. “I am a very private sort of person.” It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. At other times nothing happens, though as Beckett might have said, it does that sometimes. In his most recent plays, Stoppard has turned from the matter of England, which preoccupied him for decades, to examine his European heritage: first, his Czech origins in 2006’s Rock’n’Roll, where he imagines an alternative existence for himself if he had returned from England to live in Czechoslovakia; and now in Leopoldstadt, where the playwright contemplates the fate of those family members who were not lucky enough to escape. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays. Listen to the latest episodes of Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee on BBC Sounds Audiences become puzzled, discomfited, but also engaged. 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Michael Horden was wonderfully rumpled as the philosopher, repeatedly asking “Is God?”, and Diana Rigg was radiant as his wife Dotty: “her talent was luminous”, as Stoppard remarked last month when she died. Some were successful; others less so. The final page of the play is a direct transcription of the questions Stoppard asked about various family members. On Tom Stoppard’s birthday. In a sense The fact that his plays are so immediately recognisable, so unmistakably Stoppardian, may contribute to both sides of his reputation. As Lee puts it: “She never told her sons, either that she was Jewish or that most of her family had perished in the Holocaust.”, The Straüssler family background took decades to surface properly. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the greatest playwrights of our time, as he talks to Lee, about his fascinating life and career in theatre. Marta and her two sons, Petr and Tomás, went on a ship to – they thought – Australia but it ended up in India. Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre decided to take a gamble on the unknown young playwright, with the result that, as Lee puts it with a proper sense of drama, on Tuesday 11 April 1967 at the Old Vic, “the lights went up on two men in Elizabethan costume, betting on the toss of a coin”. It was torpedoed and sunk; they never saw him again. Bristol, where the family now lived, was a hive of theatre. In 1984 he signed a letter of support for the US invasion of Grenada: being in the company of such co-signatories as Paul Johnson, Kingsley Amis, Roger Scruton, and Peregrine Worsthorne just isn’t a good look. This is a hugely impressive work. "The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. Wilde channelled a whole cultural movement into gorgeous excess while writing a handful of plays that could be put on in the local church hall with a reasonable chance of success. His politics have been a particular sticking-point. In 1993’s Arcadia, seen by Dublin audiences in two productions at the Gate, everything came together in perfect equilibrium: ideas about chaos theory and emotion, seriousness and humour, the past and the present. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. We also learn not just which actors got awards for stage and film versions of his work, but even who presented them with their awards. In 1942 they attempted to flee again when the Japanese invaded. The luck remained with Tom as he grew up in England. Tom Stoppard | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica This is a hugely impressive work. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. Stoppard was born TomáÅ¡ Straussler, in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. Hermione Lee sheds light on a private man, from his Czech Jewish past to his marriages, Tom Stoppard in London, 2018. Buy this book. Eugen sought to follow, on a ship bound for Australia. Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. Readers who, by contrast, like their biographies to romp along from lunch party to lunch party may find that Lee’s long analyses of the plays clog the action, but for my money her astute and unfailingly clear accounts of Stoppard’s complex creations are among the great strengths of this exceptional biography. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. For both, he wrote some of his best parts and finally refuted the long-standing charge that he did not know how to write women. John Wood, an actor who seemed to have been put on earth for the express purpose of incarnating some of Stoppard’s wittiest characters, is reputed to have turned to a somnolent matinee audience once during a performance of Travesties and snapped: “Oh, do keep up!” Congratulating oneself on keeping up has been one of the major pleasures of spending an evening in Stoppardia. The mother and two young children were rushed on to a ship that was about to leave; they ended up in Bombay. Knopf, $35 (896p) ISBN 978-0-451-49322-4. Pinter permanently enlarged our sense of what a play can be. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. They also had two sons, the second of whom, Ed, is a successful actor. Wikpedia at 20: Did you know Will Ferrell was once not killed in a paragliding incident? Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. It may be that gilded lilies just aren’t my thing, but I would admire this at times brilliant portrait even more without these showbiz equivalents of the Court Circular. Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousness. Hermione Lee is the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a non-stop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. Does this mean that his plays are little more than a diverting display of verbal fireworks, clever but of no significance, or are deeper themes about our experience of life being addressed? Tom Stoppard: A Life Hermione Lee. It all makes the audience pay attention; occasionally it makes them pay dearly. It’s hard to know how literary history will treat Stoppard. You could lie there … A brilliant 23-year-old actor named Peter O’Toole starred in Hamlet and Waiting for Godot. Stoppard revised and cut ruthlessly as his plays were in rehearsal and even during their run. There their mother met and later married an English officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought the whole family to England in February 1946. The father was to follow, but he never did: the Japanese sank the ship he was on. When it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe it was rubbished by the dailies: “Inexplicable throughout” (Daily Mail). Several years later, the attractive 35-year-old widow was wooed and won by a British army officer, Maj Kenneth Stoppard, who promptly brought his new family from India to England in 1946. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre. Stoppard’s life will not need writing again. One of the main lessons Stoppard learned from Beckett and Pinter was the dramatic effectiveness of withholding information. It was news to me that Tom Stoppard and Sinéad Cusack had a relationship. What he lacked in experience he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got himself made the paper’s motoring correspondent without revealing that he couldn’t drive. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". Stoppard and his first wife, Josie, married young and had two sons. Lee had published acclaimed lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee draws on hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and long conversations with Stoppard himself. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. "Tom Stoppard: A Life" by Ira Nadel The author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" has overcome youthful tragedy to live a charmed life -- … Tomáš Sträussler was born in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1937. The past was behind them and not mentioned. Lee concludes that “people feel” he “has made a difference to our culture”, but it’s not easy to say what that difference might be. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. But he seems, admirably, to have decided to put his trust in the “mesh” and to allow his biographer a completely free hand. 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