Born Tomáš Straüssler in 1937 in what would soon be Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Tom Stoppard spent the first eight years of his life in a state of flux. Fleeing the invading German forces, the Straüssler family relocated to Singapore, where Tom’s father Eugen was killed during the Japanese invasion. Finding themselves on the run again, Tom, his mother Martha, and brother Peter moved to India. Eventually, they settled in England in 1946, a year after his mother had married a British Army major by the name of Kenneth Stoppard. Tom, Peter, and Martha adopted Major Stoppard’s surname and his homeland as their own, finally establishing permanent residency in the United Kingdom.
Tom Straüssler, now Tom Stoppard, recalls his arrival in England as a sort of homecoming, saying, “as soon as we all landed up in England, I knew I had found a home. I embraced the language and the landscape.” An early childhood of nearly biannual relocation led to a continuous transformation of his identity, which may explain the vast scope of Stoppard’s canon: his plays touch on subjects as varied as the role of rock and roll in Czech political revolution (Rock ‘n’ Roll), love and art in soon-to-be-independent India (Indian Ink), and whether consciousness and altruism can be explained by science (The Hard Problem).
Though diverse in subject and scope, Stoppard’s work often features whip-smart characters grappling with complex questions, and frequently confronting the limitations of the intellect itself. This reputation for intellectualism is especially surprising given the young Stoppard’s lack of interest in academic achievement. He recalls: “the chief influence of my education on me was negative. I left school thoroughly bored by the idea of anything intellectual…I’d been totally bored and alienated by everyone from Shakespeare to Dickens.” Tired of his scholastic setting, Stoppard left school at 17 after finishing two O Levels (England’s non-advanced testing at the time) in order to pursue journalism. However, after seeing Peter O’Toole’s performance in Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1958, his already burgeoning interest in theatre intensified. Of attending that pivotal performance, Stoppard remembers, “It was everything it was supposed to be. It was exciting and mysterious and eloquent.” And so Stoppard joined the ranks of other young hopefuls aspiring to a career in the theatre. He recalls, “after 1956 everybody of my age who wanted to write, wanted to write plays.” Tom Stoppard, however, would distinguish himself as one of the truly exceptional playwrights of his generation.
By 23, Stoppard cut back his work at the Bristol Evening World so that he could devote himself more fully to creative writing. He completed some radio plays and even a novel (Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon), but his first big break on stage came with his 1966 comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a dazzling, profound, and stunning intertextual play in which two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the eponymous protagonist’s school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—take center stage, as Stoppard details how their baffling experience in the Royal Court of Denmark may have played out. Two years after it was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the play saw its professional debut at the Royal National Theatre in 1968. The production transferred to the West End and then to Broadway. Praised by The New York Times as “a very funny play about death. Very funny, very brilliant, very chilling,” the play received the Tony Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Play.
Over the course of five decades, Stoppard has written 35 stage plays (including seven translations or adaptations of foreign work), 11 radio plays, 6 television plays, and 14 film and television adaptations of books and plays, including co-writing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and sharing writing credit on 1998’s Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard sees his experimentalism as a kind of restless curiosity: “Before being carried out feet first, I would like to have done a bit of absolutely everything. Really, without any evidence of any talent in those other directions, I find it very hard to turn down offers to write an underwater ballet for dolphins or a play for a motorcyclist on the wall of death."
Stoppard has received an impressive array of accolades over his career, including five Tony Awards, a Drama Desk Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, an Academy Award, induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, and honorary doctorates from Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II knighted Stoppard. Receiving the high honor at Buckingham Palace was a touching experience for Stoppard, who fondly speaks of the event: “I have felt English almost from the day I arrived, but the knighthood puts some kind of seal on that emotion."
And while Stoppard has continued to experiment with tone and subject matter, common thematic threads hold together the plays contained within his sweeping body of work: his characters are sharp, determined, grappling with questions and ideas bigger than themselves, or, as Ben Brantley in the New York Times puts it: “Mr. Stoppard’s characters have always seemed to possess more restless gray matter than those of any other contemporary playwright. But his characters’ thoughts have always been palpably propelled by their passions”. In Stoppard’s life as in his work, intellectual curiosity, coupled with a fierce desire to make things happen, makes for brilliant, touching art.
—Alexandra Kennedy, with additional material by Taylor Barrett Gaines