Hermione Lee’s 977-page authorised biography of Tom Stoppard comes sandwiched between two photographs. They are a clue to the dual identity of one of the country’s most celebrated playwrights. The front cover photograph depicts the urbane English writer, whose plays—from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love and beyond, by way of Travesties and Hapgood—have made him a heavyweight of mainstream British theatre for over 50 years. The photograph on the back shows a chubby toddler, a lost Jewish Czech boy, happily engrossed in pulling pictures from a book. The question at the heart of Lee’s book is how Tomáš Sträussler, the son of a middle European doctor, became Sir Tom Stoppard OM. How did that transformation impact on his plays and screenplays—and what got lost along the way?
Stoppard is that rare theatrical beast, one who has enjoyed success in both the subsidised and commercial theatre sectors. His job, he says, is very simple: “To prevent people leaving their seats before the entertainment is over.” Although widely liked, he has not always been fully embraced by theatre’s left-leaning community. Most British playwrights do not praise the policies of Margaret Thatcher as Stoppard did in the 1980s. (He liked what she was doing to the unions as well as her anti-communist stance.) Nor do they have Princess Michael of Kent pop round for tea. When a young David Hare asked William Gaskill, the legendary Royal Court director, about the theatre’s policy, Gaskill growled: “Never to put on a play by Tom Stoppard.”
*** So full acceptance has taken a long time. It wasn’t until 2006 that the Royal Court finally reconciled with Stoppard when it staged Rock ‘n’ Roll, a play that spans 22 years from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the retreat of communism in 1990—from the Velvet Underground to the Velvet Revolution. Stoppard is the master of unexpected connections: his 1974 play Travesties, successfully revived by Patrick Marber in 2016, is a dazzling confection spun around the fact that in 1917 Lenin, Tristan Tzara and Joyce all happened to be in Zürich.
That cover photograph shows us Stoppard as every inch the confident, successful and charming playwright. But there is a wariness in the steely gaze, as if the subject does not want to be examined too closely. There was a time when it would have been hard to imagine him co-operating with an official biography. Not for nothing does he have Mr Pike in his 1995 play Indian Ink declare: “Biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.” That must be pretty daunting for any biographer. But I don’t think that Lee gets him wrong at all.
Stoppard’s journey is set against the catastrophes and changing contours of 20th-century history and geography. It takes us from pre-war Europe to the home counties, from outsider to insider, from critic to playwright—and from the dazzling jokiness of 1966’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern right through to Leopoldstadt, his most revealing and personal play, which premiered in January this year. Leopoldstadt was playing at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End when the coronavirus lockdown came. As Stoppard has since entered his 84th year, it might well be his last major work.
Nestled within the Russian doll construction of Leopoldstadt is Leo, the son and grandson of a Viennese Jewish family. The play charts the family’s history from turn-of-the-century Vienna to 1955. Leo was born Leo Rosenbaum in Vienna but takes his English stepfather’s name—just as Stoppard did when his widowed mother married Major Kenneth Stoppard in India in 1945—and becomes Leo Chamberlain, a callow English comic writer who knows little about his past. The ebullient young Stoppard likewise knew nothing of his past—when asked about his background in his younger days, he jokily dubbed himself “a fake Englishman” or “bounced Czech.”
It is not a stretch to see Leo as a rueful portrait of the artist as a young man. Whatever he may have had Mr Pike saying about biography a couple of decades earlier, Stoppard seems to have mellowed on autobiography at least. Lee describes Leopoldstadt as “an act of restitution” by Stoppard, one that reflects the Jewish identity that he did not unearth until 1993 when, over a cup of tea at the National Theatre with a relative, he discovered the terrible fate of many in his mother’s Czech family, who had been murdered in the Holocaust. It was something about which his mother had never spoken. This is a biography that charts not just physical journeys but also the journey from blindness to self-knowledge.
Lee’s epigraph, fitting for a biography, is Hannah’s famous quote from 1993’s Arcadia. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in,” she declares. It’s surprising that a playwright who is an autodidact (Stoppard went into journalism without ever attending university), and who has a fearsome reputation for bamboozling and delighting audiences with his apparently ready knowledge of everything from quarks to Latin, chaos theory to Russian history, had, for so many years, such little curiosity about his own background.
It makes you see the earlier plays as a series of dazzling decoys, deflecting attention away from their author and at the same time offering clues that there is some weighted truth concealed deep within them. Over and over, and long before he was cognisant of his own past, Stoppard had written about the unknowability of history, the sliding doors of happenstance and the way the cards of life fall out on the table. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern begins with the pair betting on coin flips.
In Hapgood (1988), Kerner suggests that in science “you get what you interrogate for” and that may well be true for biographers, too. While Lee’s book offers few new revelations, its achievement is the rounded portrait that emerges, that of an artist whose work has become ever more interesting the more he has been present in it. Arcadia’s flaming warmth is lit by an acknowledgement of the fragility at the heart of all existence, including the author’s own; Leopoldstadt recognises, more specifically, that there is a terrible price to be paid for cultural assimilation.
*** The future Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler on 3rd July, 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. He was the second of two children born to Eugen, a doctor working for a hospital built to serve the workers of the Bata shoe factory, and Marta (née Beck). In one of those Stoppardian quirks of fate, Eugen Sträussler and his family moved to Singapore in 1939 where a large Bata factory was being built.
In 1942, when Stoppard was not yet five years old, Singapore fell to the Japanese. Stoppard, his elder brother Petr (soon to become Peter) and his mother Marta were hurried onto a boat that eventually led them to India; his father stayed behind as part of the Volunteer Defence Corps. Stoppard never saw him again. Eugen almost certainly died within a month of the family leaving Singapore. His death became part of the curtain of silence that fell over the family’s history. That silence became absolute when Marta married an Englishman, Major Stoppard, and the family moved to what Lee calls the “safe haven” of England. The boys’ names were changed, they spoke only English, attended prep school and the past was never mentioned.
As an ambitious journalist, Stoppard assumed different personas, and subsequently did the same in his plays. His breakthrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, performed first at the Edinburgh fringe in 1966 and subsequently at the National Theatre, is full of double images; his spy tale Hapgood features twins and Night and Day double identities. It was as though he was unconsciously aware of his dual inheritance even if—rather like Leo in Leopold-stadt—he had transformed into a cricket-loving, country-house dwelling, grouse-shooting Englishman. Interviewed by Roy Plomley for Desert Island Discs, he said: “I feel very English.”
Part of that was simply due to his boarding school upbringing. But it was also an immigrant’s gratitude to an adopted country that made him an establishment figure—what Lee calls “a playwright without a cause, except the cause of good language and good art.”
Eventually Stoppard did find his cause in the service of PEN and Index on Censorship, and through his support for Czech dissident Václav Havel and more recently Belarus Free Theatre. These causes leaked into his writing: the more Stoppard has discovered about his personal history the more open, honest, richer and shaded his plays have become. The clever and flip young man who wrote Jumpers and The Real Inspector Hound is a far cry from the mature, self-reflective artist who wrote The Coast of Utopia (2002), set in 19th-century Russia, and then Leopoldstadt.
Lee certainly goes for the detail. Stoppard is circumcised, his brother is not; Miriam Stoppard (his second wife) liked to drive a Porsche. While sometimes the meticulousness feels like the mere accumulation of trivia, on occasion it is illuminating. Miriam’s transformation of the gardens of Iver Grove, the country mansion Stoppard purchased in 1979, was almost certainly one of the inspirations for Lady Croom’s landscaping of Sidley Park, the Derbyshire estate at the heart of Arcadia.
As you might expect from an authorised biographer, Lee is sometimes a little breathless—it seems like she has fallen for Stoppard’s legendary charm. Writing about his 1963 professional debut with a TV play called A Walk on the Water, she tells us that it was broadcast on the same day that Denys Lasdun was appointed as architect for the new National Theatre on the South Bank. “Two markers,” writes Lee, “were set down that day for the next era of British theatre.”
Were they? Stoppard is a substantial playwright, but he has seldom been a groundbreaking one. If being “a playwright without a cause” put the young Stoppard out of step politically with his peers, he was also out of kilter with the radicalism of their method: he was not a major theatrical innovator. He did work a little with the American-born community activist ED Berman, founder of Inter-Action, an organisation dedicated to exploring the creativity of inner-city communities, including writing the farcical double bill Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) for Berman’s Almost Free Theatre. But mostly he operated outside of the experimental theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. When critics hailed the undoubtedly clever double time frame of Arcadia, they overlooked the fact that fringe playwrights of the 1970s and 80s, such as Sarah Daniels, had already experimented with such devices.
But British theatre needs many different kinds of practitioners. As he has grown older and tapped into his own history, Stoppard has come to produce plays that no longer just dazzle the audience, but also have the capacity to move them. In Arcadia the tutor Septimius observes sadly: “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone on the empty shore.” Lee’s accomplished biography suggests that while the playwright who understands his own mystery and his own history is no less alone, he is a much more potent artist than the one who refuses to reflect upon the self.
Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber, £30) by Hermione Lee
