Jim Hunter - Tom Stoppard: Faber Critical Guide

Tom Stoppard spoke English from an early age and has lived in England since he was nine. His writing shows a delight in English language and literature, and at one point uses the particularly English example of a cricket bat as an emblem of craftsmanship. Yet he was actually born Czech, as Thomas Straussler, in 1937; and was twice an infant refugee: first from the Nazis in 1939 and then in 1942 from Singapore and the Japanese, at which time his father died in enemy hands, and thats that (quoted by Kenneth Tynan in ShowPeople).

In Darjeeling, in northern India, his mother worked for the Czech shoe company Bata, who had employed his father, and Tom boarded at an American multi-racial school. In 1946 his mother married Major Kenneth Stoppard and the family moved to England. Tom went to boarding prep school (a privileged education, a lovely house, acres of parkland, we had a lovely time: SundayTimes, 1974) and on to a senior independent school. The danger and crises of his early childhood were followed by a relatively fortunate upbringing, in peacetime and in a stable country. This sequence in Stoppards life repeated danger overlaid by apparent security almost certainly contributed to his later personality and to the plays we shall be studying; and I return to it in the final chapter of this book (p. 235).

Stoppard left school in 1954, aged seventeen and thoroughly bored by the idea of anything intellectual alienated by everyone from Shakespeare to Dickens (TheatreQuarterly). For nine years he worked as a journalist in Bristol, eventually trying his hand at fiction and plays. In 1963 he moved to London, his first TV play was shown and a novel was commissioned; this was followed by plays for BBC Radio (including five episodes of TheDales, a radio soap with a huge regular audience) and short stories in a hardback anthology. Stoppards apprenticeship was similar to that of most eventually successful dramatists: hard graft, gaining professional expertise by reviewing and writing playscripts for whatever market could be found.

The breakthrough year was 1966, when RosencrantzandGuildensternAreDead was acclaimed at the Edinburgh Festival. For well over thirty years since then, Stoppard has consistently held his position as one of Englands most admired and enjoyed dramatists. He was knighted becoming Sir Tom in 1997. In addition to his own plays, he has scripted adaptations of European comedies and the screenplays of many films, including the 1999 success, ShakespeareinLove. He often attends rehearsals of his new plays, rarely making a direct intervention but remaining on hand to consider redrafting a line or a whole scene; and directors and actors consistently say his presence is helpful.

Stoppard has been married twice and has four grown-up sons. He prefers to keep a low public profile, but emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to be politically active in human-rights protests against Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1977 he made his first return visit to Czechoslovakia, and became a friend of the dramatist Vaclav Havel, who at the time was just released from prison (he was re-imprisoned later) and eventually became the countrys first president after Communist rule. Stoppard describes himself as conservative, and is half-way religious I approve of belief in God and I try to behave as if there is one, but that hardly amounts to faith (InConversation:Guppy). What he does firmly defend is his belief in moral absolutes: The difference between moral rules and the rules of tennis is that the rules of tennis can be changed (see