Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard was a British playwright and screenwriter. He wrote for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covered the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical bases of society. Stoppard, a playwright of the Royal National Theatre, was one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation and was critically compared with William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a Jewish child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He spent three years at a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas, then settled with his family in England after the war, in 1946. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n' Roll, and Leopoldstadt. He wrote the screenplays for Brazil, Empire of the Sun, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma, and Anna Karenina, as well as the BBC/HBO limited series Parade's End. He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, adapting his own 1966 play as its screenplay, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
Stoppard received numerous accolades including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, three Laurence Olivier Awards, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". His final play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna, premiered in 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. It won the 2020 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2023 Tony Award for Best Play.
Early life and education
Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. He was the younger son of Martha Becková and Eugen Sträussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. His parents were non-observant Jews. 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 Bata had a factory.Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to British India. Stoppard's father volunteered to remain in Singapore, knowing that as a doctor he would be needed in its defence. Stoppard long believed that his father had perished in Japanese captivity as a prisoner of war, but later discovered that his father had been reported drowned after the ship he was aboard was bombed by Japanese forces, as he tried to flee Singapore in 1942. In 1941, when Tomáš was five, he, his brother Petr, and their mother were evacuated to Darjeeling, India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial school, where the brothers became Tom and Peter.
In 1945, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British Army. Kenneth adopted her children and the family moved to Nottingham, England, in 1946. In Nottingham, Stoppard was "warmly welcomed" by his stepfather's family and he later noted that by this point in his life "English was my only language. Suddenly I was an English schoolboy." Stoppard once wrote that his upbringing in England led him to become "an honorary Englishman", and stated that "I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in. 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 observed, 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, a preparatory school in Nottinghamshire, and later Pocklington School, a private school in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Pocklington School built the Tom Stoppard Theatre in his name, which he opened in May 2001.
Stoppard left school at 17 and began work as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol. Years later, he came to regret the decision to forgo a university education, but at the time, he loved his work as a journalist and was passionate 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 him into the world of theatre. At the Bristol Old Vic, 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
Early work
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 developed and retitled Enter a Free Man. He said the work owed much to Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Within a week of 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 under his own name and the pseudonym William Boot. In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend five 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, A Separate Peace and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank. On 11 April 1967 – following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festivalthe opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in a National Theatre production at the Old Vic made Stoppard an overnight success. Jumpers places a professor of moral philosophy in a murder mystery thriller alongside a slew of radical gymnasts. Travesties 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. Stoppard wrote one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. Its narrative follows the failing historian Moon, who takes the job of Boswell to the aristocrat Malquist. While not critically successful, the novel contains character tropes and themes that would later be used in Stoppard's plays.
1980s
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. Stoppard became influenced by the works of Polish and Czech absurdists. He was co-opted into the Outrapo group, a far-from-serious French movement to improve actors' stage technique through science.In 1982, Stoppard premiered his play The Real Thing. The story revolves around a male-female relationship and the struggle between the actress and the member of a group fighting to free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest. The leading roles were originated by Roger Rees and Felicity Kendal. The story examines various constructs of honesty including a play within a play, to explore the theme of reality versus appearance. It has been described as one of Stoppard's "most popular, enduring and autobiographical plays."
The play made its Broadway transfer in 1984, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, with Christine Baranski in a supporting role. The transfer was a critical success with The New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich declaring, "The Broadway version of The Real Thing—a substantial revision of the original London production—is not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years." The production earned seven Tony Award nominations, winning five awards, including Best Play, as well as awards for Nichols, Irons, Close, and Baranski. This was Stoppard's third Tony Award for Best Play, following Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968 and Travesties in 1976.
In 1985, Stoppard co-wrote Brazil, a satirical science-fiction dark comedy film, with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown. The film received near universal acclaim. Pauline Kael, critic for The New Yorker, declared "Visually, it's an original, bravura piece of moviemaking... Gilliam's vision is an organic thing on the screen—and that's a considerable achievement". Stoppard, Gilliam, and McKeown were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, losing to Witness. Stoppard went on to write the scripts for Steven Spielberg's films Empire of the Sun, based on the book by J. G. Ballard, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg later stated that though Stoppard was uncredited for the latter of the two, "he was responsible for almost every line of dialogue in the film".
For his 1985 appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Stoppard chose "Careless Love" by Bessie Smith as his favourite track. He also selected Inferno in two languages by Dante Alighieri as his chosen book and a plastic football as his luxury item.