Pinter permanently enlarged our sense of what a play can be. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. This is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the greatest playwrights of our time, as he talks to Lee, about his fascinating life and career in theatre. Hermione Lee’s biography of Tom Stoppard is an “astute and unfailingly clear” commentary on the playwright’s life and work. Her attentive exposition of the themes and intricate plot of Arcadia is almost worth the price of admission by itself; Stoppard has often been criticised for being “heartless” or too purely “cerebral”, but it is one of Lee’s several literary-critical triumphs to identify the emotions that drive so much of his work, especially his middle-period masterpieces such as Arcadia and The Invention of Love. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. He was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish doctor and his wife. There their mother met and later married an English officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought the whole family to England in February 1946. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. It all makes the audience pay attention; occasionally it makes them pay dearly. Hermione Lee has written an authorized biography of playwright, screenwriter, translator, and man of letters Tom Stoppard, called Tom Stoppard: A Life.It was released in the United Kingdom on October 1st and should appear in the United States on February 23, 2021. How our experience in the theatre during one of his plays relates to our lives outside is a question that has nagged at discussions of Stoppard’s standing as a writer. He has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as “England’s most rightwing playwright”. Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. Shakespeare and Beckett fizzed in Stoppard’s brain and fused over the years to inspire his first play in 1967, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty, First published: Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 06:00. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … "The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. Hermione Lee has done as well anybody could to bring this fundamentally private man to light. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Stoppard may not have gone to university, but he remained a scholar in his own creative way when it came to preparing a play. He associated the country with the freedom of the individual and of the press. From left: Wilf Scolding (Septimus Hodge), Larrington Walker (Richard Noakes), Dakota Blue Richards (Thomasina Coverly) and Kirsty Besterman (Lady Croom) in. John Wood, an actor who seemed to have been put on earth for the express purpose of incarnating some of Stoppard’s wittiest characters, is reputed to have turned to a somnolent matinee audience once during a performance of Travesties and snapped: “Oh, do keep up!” Congratulating oneself on keeping up has been one of the major pleasures of spending an evening in Stoppardia. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. These challenging works each receive detailed analysis here. It’s hard to know how literary history will treat Stoppard. To set against this, there have been numerous revivals of his best plays where critics, depending on the production, have raved all over again, sometimes claiming to see depths that they missed on a first viewing. In a sense ... an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. Readers who, by contrast, like their biographies to romp along from lunch party to lunch party may find that Lee’s long analyses of the plays clog the action, but for my money her astute and unfailingly clear accounts of Stoppard’s complex creations are among the great strengths of this exceptional biography. There have also been repeated grumbles that his are the kinds of play you can only see once. Rather like certain kinds of crime fiction, it is argued, the action is bound to seem a little lame the second time around when you know how the trick is done. It is hard to imagine a more distinguished biographical pairing than a book on Sir Tom Stoppard written by Dame Hermione Lee. • Tom Stoppard: A Life is published by Faber (£30). The past was behind them and not mentioned. His politics have been a particular sticking-point. The key book for all time on Tom Stoppard: the biography of our greatest living playwright, by one of the leading literary biographers in the English-speaking world, a star in her own right, Hermione Lee. The fact that his plays are so immediately recognisable, so unmistakably Stoppardian, may contribute to both sides of his reputation. Other plays followed, roughly every four or five years. Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre decided to take a gamble on the unknown young playwright, with the result that, as Lee puts it with a proper sense of drama, on Tuesday 11 April 1967 at the Old Vic, “the lights went up on two men in Elizabethan costume, betting on the toss of a coin”. It is how I will always see him.He is a great playwright, and this is a great biography. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee review – an exceptional biography An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the … When her long search for her first son was finally successful in 2006, she elected to spend time with Richard Boyd Barrett in Dublin rather than with Stoppard in the house they shared in France. It helps that its subject is still alive and professionally active: Leopoldstadt was premiered in London’s West End in January, enjoying six weeks of success before being prematurely closed by the pandemic lockdown. (We learn, interestingly, that he thinks the former is possibly his best play but the latter is his favourite, though that view may have pre-dated the writing of Leopoldstadt.). Almost 1,000 pages is a lot of mesh, and it’s best not to press too hard on what might be meant by “our real life”: in Stoppardia, such questions tend to lead to long speeches about chaos theory. It is tempting to see “Hermione Lee” as one of his greatest creations – a professor who knows more about a playwright who writes about professors than he knows about himself, a narrator who understands about unreliable narrators and isn’t fazed by them, a reader who always gets the joke. In 1942 they attempted to flee again when the Japanese invaded. The father was to follow, but he never did: the Japanese sank the ship he was on. She understands the pride Stoppard felt when in 1993 he had two major plays running concurrently at the RSC and the National, “the first playwright ever to have done so”, and she gives us glimpses behind the scenes, such as one actor coming off the stage when a play seemed to be going badly, saying “It’s like Stonehenge out there.” It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. Felicity Kendall had just emerged from her own marriage and wished to preserve her independence. Stoppard’s life will not need writing again. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. Tom Stoppard | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica Simon Gray nicely caught this when he wrote: “It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except possibly his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. No Hiding by Rob Kearney: Is this a memoir or a marketing tool? Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. At other times nothing happens, though as Beckett might have said, it does that sometimes. Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousness. The young Stoppard chose to become a journalist. Both a pitch-perfect analysis of the great playwright’s body of work and a scintillating account of a remarkable life lived to its fullest, this biography of Tom Stoppard is another triumph for the incomparable skills of Hermione Lee. Marta and her two sons, Petr and Tomás, went on a ship to – they thought – Australia but it ended up in India. The more old-school Laurence Olivier took a bit more persuading but was won around by Tynan, and the play was a triumph. Sign up to the Irish Times books newsletter for features, podcasts and more, For the best site experience please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play. Lee had published acclaimed lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. Does this mean that his plays are little more than a diverting display of verbal fireworks, clever but of no significance, or are deeper themes about our experience of life being addressed? Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the parties and famous friends, but also identifies the emotions that drive much of his work. Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. A lot of pages could have been saved by just saying there was no famous person he didn’t meet (he has invited 650 of his closest friends to his biennial party). In 1993’s Arcadia, seen by Dublin audiences in two productions at the Gate, everything came together in perfect equilibrium: ideas about chaos theory and emotion, seriousness and humour, the past and the present. When Hitler invaded in March 1939, the Sträusslers and other professional-class Jewish families (his father was a doctor) were advised to leave as soon as possible. Declan Kiberd remembers the playwright calling on Prof Richard Ellmann in his Oxford rooms in the 1970s to discuss Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, which provided the foundational story of 1974’s Travesties. The final page of the play is a direct transcription of the questions Stoppard asked about various family members. 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He has always thought of a play as an event, not a text: the script is just a partly failed attempt to transcribe the most recent version of the event. The boys went to school in Derbyshire, and “Tom”, identifying passionately with his new country, grew up an Englishman, playing cricket and playing the part. "Tom Stoppard: A Life" by Ira Nadel The author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" has overcome youthful tragedy to live a charmed life -- … Wikpedia at 20: Did you know Will Ferrell was once not killed in a paragliding incident? Tomáš Sträussler was born in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1937. Along with its successors, it certainly did that: Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock’n’Roll (2006). But the core of Tom Stoppard remains hermetic, sealed. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. Lee concludes that “people feel” he “has made a difference to our culture”, but it’s not easy to say what that difference might be. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. Stoppard has given us wonderful nights out in the theatre, occasions that make us think as well as laugh (and sometimes cry). You'd have a chance at least. Sitting outside on a freezing cold day, a recognisable Stoppard was working on the script of The Hard Problem (then in rehearsal) with intense concentration, exhaling clouds from an endless stream of cigarettes. Hermione Lee is the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. We also learn not just which actors got awards for stage and film versions of his work, but even who presented them with their awards. “I am a very private sort of person.” It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. The Books Quiz: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent is set in which county? You could lie there … But he seems, admirably, to have decided to put his trust in the “mesh” and to allow his biographer a completely free hand. The list goes on, right up to his latest play, Leopoldstadt, whose successful opening run was cut short by the lockdown. In 1984 he signed a letter of support for the US invasion of Grenada: being in the company of such co-signatories as Paul Johnson, Kingsley Amis, Roger Scruton, and Peregrine Worsthorne just isn’t a good look. It observes him in rehearsal, looks at the changes he makes to his classic plays over many years, and makes brilliant close readings of his best, … Wilde channelled a whole cultural movement into gorgeous excess while writing a handful of plays that could be put on in the local church hall with a reasonable chance of success. What he lacked in experience he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got himself made the paper’s motoring correspondent without revealing that he couldn’t drive. The only times I found my mind wandering to the prospect of interval drinks were during the slightly breathless (and hugely detailed) descriptions of Stoppard’s social life once he became a celebrity. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee draws on hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and long conversations with Stoppard himself. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a non-stop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. Kenneth Tynan was on the phone on Monday on behalf of the National Theatre, where he was dramaturg and adviser. His most recent plays, exploring his hitherto suppressed European heritage, richly deserve to be seen in Dublin. On Tom Stoppard’s birthday. Some were successful; others less so. Audiences become puzzled, discomfited, but also engaged. After further peregrinations around India, Marta Sträussler and her two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the boys went to an English school. Not all readers will take quite as indulgent a view of Stoppard as Lee does. Stoppard was born TomáÅ¡ Straussler, in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. It would be interesting see him at work on this script of his life: as a master of concision, he would probably cut a good deal, while revising the ending right up to the penultimate performance. This is a hugely impressive work. Then on Sunday Bill Bryden in the Observer proclaimed it “the most brilliant debut since John Arden’s”. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. Things soon went from good to better. Early life and career The second son of a doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company, Thomas Straussler (Stoppard) was born on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … I saw it that year as a student. Listen to the latest episodes of Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee on BBC Sounds This is a hugely impressive work. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer “I simply don’t like revealing myself,” Tom Stoppard once said. It was a runaway success of extraordinary proportions. Buy this book. The blood-line of Stoppard’s early hits might be described as “out of Beckett by The Goon Show”, though “Pinter meets Beyond the Fringe” catches something, too. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays. The answers were almost all the same: “Auschwitz.”. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”. The pandemic is not the first time Stoppard has confronted global disaster. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie. But she could not keep up with his stratospheric ascent, and in one press photograph is shown standing behind him with “Mrs Stoppard” on her apron. Stoppard revised and cut ruthlessly as his plays were in rehearsal and even during their run. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. 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