Tom Stoppard: A Life also details Sir Tom's 10-year relationship with Irish actress Sinéad Cusack, which ended in 2007 after Cusack was reunited with the … One of the main lessons Stoppard learned from Beckett and Pinter was the dramatic effectiveness of withholding information. 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. Quoting that line in his biography (twice) is a nice touch. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". You could lie there … Stoppard emerges from this deeply sympathetic, even forgiving, biography as a shy man who has found a way to show off; a man who can’t quite believe his luck but can’t quite believe anything else, either. At the very least, his work reveals a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of existence. 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”. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. 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. In December 2014 my wife and I glimpsed him as we passed London’s National Theatre. In 1993 Stoppard (and his mother, in her early 80s, who accompanied him) asked of a relative who met with them in London: “I mean, how Jewish were we?” To which she replied: “You were completely Jewish.”. (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.). The pandemic is not the first time Stoppard has confronted global disaster. It helps that its subject is still alive and professionally active: Leopoldstadt was premiered in London’s West End in January, enjoying six weeks of success before being prematurely closed by the pandemic lockdown. Jumpers followed in 1972, mixing farce with metaphysics. 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. There have also been repeated grumbles that his are the kinds of play you can only see once. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays. He has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as “England’s most rightwing playwright”. Writing the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love brought in the odd penny, too (plus an Oscar), as did a lot of other film work and adaptations. But she could not keep up with his stratospheric ascent, and in one press photograph is shown standing behind him with “Mrs Stoppard” on her apron. Bristol, where the family now lived, was a hive of theatre. 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. Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. In a sense The fact that his plays are so immediately recognisable, so unmistakably Stoppardian, may contribute to both sides of his reputation. 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. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre. Tom Stoppard Life Family Your The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. 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. Buy this book. 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. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. 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. The young Stoppard chose to become a journalist. In a sense, though, those are its strengths. Ira Nadel's biography of Tom Stoppard is pleasantly straightforward: largely descriptive, covering a great deal of Stoppard's personal and professional life, without too much hypothesizing or analysis about what possibly motivates and moves the artist. “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. These challenging works each receive detailed analysis here. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousness. The final page of the play is a direct transcription of the questions Stoppard asked about various family members. Stoppard’s life will not need writing again. But the social side is only the half of it. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Jan Antonín BaÅ¥a, transferred his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Eur… The marriage with Miriam was the meeting of two glamorous, professionally driven people, and her media career as a health correspondent prospered along with his. It’s hard to know how literary history will treat Stoppard. It was torpedoed and sunk; they never saw him again. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. The Stoppards’ marriage was reduced to their waving at each other as they individually passed through international airports; they eventually split. It all helped to sustain a life filled with country houses and Concorde flights, marriages and not-marriages, lots of parties and an awful lot of cigarettes. Knopf, $35 (896p) ISBN 978-0-451-49322-4. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. Tom Stoppard has written some of the most important plays of the past 50 years. It observes him in rehearsal, looks at the changes he makes to his classic plays over many years, and makes brilliant close readings of his best, … Hermione Lee sheds light on a private man, from his Czech Jewish past to his marriages, Tom Stoppard in London, 2018. There their mother met and later married an English officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought the whole family to England in February 1946. They also had two sons, the second of whom, Ed, is a successful actor. "Tom Stoppard: A Life" by Ira Nadel The author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" has overcome youthful tragedy to live a charmed life -- … How our experience in the theatre during one of his plays relates to our lives outside is a question that has nagged at discussions of Stoppard’s standing as a writer. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. But he seems, admirably, to have decided to put his trust in the “mesh” and to allow his biographer a completely free hand. The only times I found my mind wandering to the prospect of interval drinks were during the slightly breathless (and hugely detailed) descriptions of Stoppard’s social life once he became a celebrity. 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. At other times nothing happens, though as Beckett might have said, it does that sometimes. "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. Then on Sunday Bill Bryden in the Observer proclaimed it “the most brilliant debut since John Arden’s”. The answers were almost all the same: “Auschwitz.”. Hermione Lee has done as well anybody could to bring this fundamentally private man to light. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Stoppard and his first wife, Josie, married young and had two sons. Tomás Sträussler became Tom Stoppard, to all intents and purposes a young English schoolboy. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. But the core of Tom Stoppard remains hermetic, sealed. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. • Tom Stoppard: A Life is published by Faber (£30). 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. When her long search for her first son was finally successful in 2006, she elected to spend time with Richard Boyd Barrett in Dublin rather than with Stoppard in the house they shared in France. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. After further peregrinations around India, Marta Sträussler and her two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the boys went to an English school. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … Kenneth Tynan was on the phone on Monday on behalf of the National Theatre, where he was dramaturg and adviser. The list goes on, right up to his latest play, Leopoldstadt, whose successful opening run was cut short by the lockdown. The complete review's Review: . In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has his Oscar Wilde character describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes”. Stoppard may not have gone to university, but he remained a scholar in his own creative way when it came to preparing a play. It is tempting to see “Hermione Lee” as one of his greatest creations – a professor who knows more about a playwright who writes about professors than he knows about himself, a narrator who understands about unreliable narrators and isn’t fazed by them, a reader who always gets the joke. 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