Tom Stoppard

Czech-born playwright, journalist, and screenwriter

• Born: July 3, 1937
• Place of Birth: Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now in Czech Republic)

Biography

Catapulted to fame in 1967 with the National Theatre’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which had premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the previous year), Tom Stoppard emerged as a leading dramatist in the second of the two waves of new drama that arrived to the London stage in the 1950s and the 1960s. Writing high comedies of ideas with what a director once described as “hypnotized brilliance,” Stoppard established a reputation almost immediately with dazzling displays of linguistic fireworks that evoked comparisons with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce. His reinventions of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600–1601) in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in Travesties (1974) are considered masterpieces. His linguistic caprices and creative plagiarism combined with a love of ideas, which his characters play with as much as they do with language.

Born Tomás Straüssler to Eugen Straüssler and Martha Beckova of Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Stoppard was two years old when his father, the company doctor for an international shoe company, was transferred to Singapore on the eve of Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Shortly before the Japanese invasion of Singapore in 1942, Stoppard, his mother, and his brother were moved to Darjeeling, India, where his mother managed a company shoe shop. Eugen was killed in the invasion, and Martha later married Major Kenneth Stoppard, who moved the family to England in 1946. Bored by school, the young Stoppard chose not to go to a university, instead becoming first a news reporter in Bristol and then a drama critic for the short-lived magazine Scene. His early writings include short stories, short radio plays, and the 1966 novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.

Although Stoppard's major early plays—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Jumpers (1972), Travesties, Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), and Hapgood (1988)—are scintillating in their language, ideas, and plots, they have frequently been criticized for the absence of emotionally credible characters and their lack of social or political commitment. In other plays for stage and television—Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), which is about political prisoners in Central Europe; Professional Foul (1977), about freedoms in Czechoslovakia; and Squaring the Circle (1984), about Poland’s Solidarity movement—Stoppard entered the political arena. Although active in the anticommunist human rights movement, he kept his distance from the many new leftist playwrights who protested economic injustices at home and strongly opposed the English class system and the effects of England’s colonial past.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Shakespeare’s two most insignificant characters take center stage and become metaphysicians as they ponder philosophical questions of existence and choice. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debate with each other and with the leader of the traveling players, some of the same problems that plague Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. In Jumpers, ethics debates occur between traditional philosopher George Moore (after George Edward Moore, the author of Principia Ethica, 1903) and modern logical positivist Archibald Jumper (patterned after the Oxford philosopher Sir Alfred Jules Ayer). Theories of art are debated in Travesties by Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. Since all three are said to have lived in Zurich about the time of the Russian Revolution, Stoppard pictures their meeting in a library in Zurich. The ingenious plot is based on the confusion of identities found in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

The debate of ideas continues in The Real Thing, in which the subject of the debate is art and love. In Hapgood, Stoppard fuses espionage, romance, and debates on quantum mechanics; the play showcases his usual brilliance of ideas, inventiveness of plot, and character identities that remain confusing even at the play’s conclusion. Stoppard is a self-educated student of physics, an interest that is reflected in both Hapgood and Arcadia (1993), the latter of which moves back and forth in time to explore the vast shifts in thinking that humankind has undergone in the transition from romanticism to scientific theory.

Perhaps one of Stoppard’s best works is the 1991 radio play In the Native State, which he later adapted for the stage as Indian Ink (1995). In it, Stoppard deals with the theme of India gaining its independence (or losing its status as a British territory) and addresses the cultural taboo of sexual relations between British women and Indian men. The Invention of Love (1997) is a memory play based on the life of A. E. Housman, a poet and classics scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Coast of Utopia (2002) is a trilogy following the lives of various nineteenth-century Russian radicals and intellectuals, including author Ivan Turgenev and revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

Stoppard followed up The Coast of Utopia with Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015), as well as some remakes of others' plays and a 2010 one-night performance piece, The Laws of War, put on for the benefit of Human Rights Watch. The Broadway musical Rock 'n' Roll, set in Czechoslovakia and England between the pivotal invasion of 1968 and 1990, deals with artistic expression and politics. The Hard Problem is the story of a young psychologist who grapples with the question of biology versus mind. In 2020, Stoppard produced his work Leopoldstadt. The play earned Stoppard his fifth Tony Award in 2023.

In addition to his plays, Stoppard has written several screenplays, most notably for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil (1985). He also adapted and directed the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) and co-wrote Shakespeare in Love (1998), the latter of which earned him and fellow screenwriter Marc Norman the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original screenplay. The year 2012 brought the release of two additional novel-to-film adaptations: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in theaters and Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End on television. Anna Karenina saw success at the box office and won several awards. In 2017, Stoppard adapted the Deborah Moggach novel, Tulip Fever (1999) to the screen with the author.

Stoppard has won numerous awards throughout his career, including five Tony Awards for best play (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, 1968; Travesties, 1976; The Real Thing, 1984; The Coast of Utopia, 2007) and one for best play revival (The Real Thing, 2000). In addition, he was awarded the 2013 PEN Pinter Prize for “cast[ing] an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and show[ing] a ‘fierce intellectual determination . . . to define the real truth of our lives and our societies,’” as well as the 2015 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award, for “his extraordinary career as a dramatist and his abiding commitment to the defense of creative freedom worldwide.” Stoppard received the Writers’ Guild award for outstanding contribution to writing in 2017. Also in 2017, Stoppard received the America Award in Literature and the David Cohen Prize. The list of entertainment and industry awards, as well as special honors, awarded to Stoppard is understandably extensive. Stoppard was made a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire in 1997.

Author Works

Drama:

A Walk on the Water, pr. 1964 (televised; revised and televised as The Preservation of George Riley, pr. 1964; revised and staged as Enter a Free Man, pr., pb. 1968)

The Gamblers, pr. 1965

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, pr. 1966

Tango, pr. 1966 (adaptation of Suawomir Mroẓek’s play)

Albert’s Bridge, pr. 1967 (radio play), pr. 1969 (staged)

The Real Inspector Hound, pr., pb. 1968 (one act)

After Magritte, pr. 1970, pb. 1993 (one act)

Dogg’s Our Pet, pr. 1971 (one act)

Jumpers, pr., pb. 1972

Travesties, pr. 1974

Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, pr., pb. 1976

The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet, pr. 1976

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, pr. 1977 (music by André Previn)

Night and Day, pr., pb. 1978

Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, pr. 1979

Undiscovered Country, pr. 1979 (adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Das weite Land)

On the Razzle, pr., pb. 1981 (adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen)

The Real Thing, pr., pb. 1982

The Dog It Was That Died, and Other Plays, pb. 1983

The Love for Three Oranges, pr. 1983 (adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera)

Rough Crossing, pr. 1984 (adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s play Play at the Castle)

Dalliance, pr., pb. 1986 (adaptation of Schnitzler’s play Liebelei)

Hapgood, pr., pb. 1988

The Boundary, pb. 1991 (with Clive Exton)

Arcadia, pr., pb. 1993

The Real Inspector Hound and Other Entertainments, pb. 1993

Indian Ink, pr., pb. 1995

The Invention of Love, pr., pb. 1997

The Seagull, pr., pb. 1997 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play)

Plays: Four, pb. 1999

Plays: Five, pb. 1999

The Coast of Utopia, pr., pb. 2002 (includes Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage)

Pirandello's Henry IV, 2004 (adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's play)

Rock 'n' Roll, 2006

The Cherry Orchard: A Comedy in Four Acts, 2009 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play)

The Hard Problem, 2015

The Laws of War, 2010

Leopoldstadt, 2020

Long Fiction:

Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, 1966

Screenplays:

The Engagement, 1970

The Romantic Englishwoman, 1975 (with Thomas Wiseman)

Despair, 1978 (adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel)

The Human Factor, 1979 (adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel)

Brazil, 1986

Empire of the Sun, 1987 (adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel)

The Russia House, 1990 (adaptation of John le Carré’s novel)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1990

Billy Bathgate, 1991 (adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s novel)

Medicine Man, 1992

Vatel, 1997 (translation and adaptation of Jeanne La-Brunne’s screenplay)

Shakespeare in Love, 1998

Enigma, 1999

Anna Karenina, 2012 (adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel)

Tulip Fever, 2017

Teleplays:

A Separate Peace, 1966

Teeth, 1967

Another Moon Called Earth, 1967

Neutral Ground, 1968

The Engagement, 1970

One Pair of Eyes, 1972 (documentary)

Boundaries, 1975 (with Clive Exton)

Three Men in a Boat, 1975 (adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s novel)

Professional Foul, 1977

Squaring the Circle, 1984

The Television Plays, 1965-1984, 1993

Poodle Springs, 1998

Parade's End, 2012 (adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's novel)

Radio Plays:

The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, 1964

M Is for Moon Among Other Things, 1964

If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, 1965

Where Are They Now?, 1970

Artist Descending a Staircase, 1972

In the Native State, 1991

Stoppard: The Plays for Radio, 1964-1991, 1994

On Dover Beach, 2007

Darkside, 2013

Nonfiction:

Conversations with Stoppard, 1995

Translation:

Largo Desolato, 1986 (of Václav Havel’s play)

Heroes, 2005 (of Gérald Sibleyras's play Le vent des peupliers)

Ivanov, 2008 (of Anton Chekhov's play)

Bibliography

Armitstead, Claire. “'Is My Play still Relevant? I Don't Care!' Tom Stoppard on his Gaza Quandary and Reviving Rock 'n' Roll.” The Guardian, 30 Nov. 2023, www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/nov/29/tom-stoppard-rock-n-roll-israel-gaza-crown. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Billington, Michael. Stoppard the Playwright. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.

Cahn, Victor L. Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1979.

Dowd, Maureen. “Sir Tom Stoppard Returns to New York With ‘Leopoldstadt.’” The New York Times, 7 Sept. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/theater/tom-stoppard-leopoldstadt-broadway.html. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Hayman, Ronald. Tom Stoppard. 4th ed., Exeter: Heinemann, 1982.

Kelly, Katherine E., editor. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge UP, 2001.

Londré, Felicia Hardison. Tom Stoppard. New York: Ungar, 1981.

Moss, Stephen. "And Now, the Real Thing." Guardian, 21 June 2002.

Rusinko, Susan. Tom Stoppard. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Sammells, Neil. Tom Stoppard: The Artist as Critic. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988.

Stoppard, Tom. "Something to Declare." Sunday Times 25 Feb. 1968: 47.

Stoppard, Tom, and Mel Gussow. Conversations with Stoppard. 1995. New York: Grove, 1996.

Tynan, Kenneth. “Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos.” New Yorker, 19 Dec. 1977, p. 41+.

Whitaker, Thomas R. Tom Stoppard. New York: Grove, 1983.