tom stoppard: a life

The list goes on, right up to his latest play, Leopoldstadt, whose successful opening run was cut short by the lockdown. His kind of quantum dramatics messes with our minds and our understanding of time and we love it, but when we get home we still have to set the alarm for work the next day. 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: A Life by Hermione Lee review â an exceptional biography An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the â¦ 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, â¦ He associated the country with the freedom of the individual and of the press. 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. No Hiding by Rob Kearney: Is this a memoir or a marketing tool? And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie. 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Michael Horden was wonderfully rumpled as the philosopher, repeatedly asking “Is God?”, and Diana Rigg was radiant as his wife Dotty: “her talent was luminous”, as Stoppard remarked last month when she died. 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. 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. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Hermione Leeâs immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. 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. 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. 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. Marta and her two sons, Petr and Tomás, went on a ship to – they thought – Australia but it ended up in India. Tomás Sträussler became Tom Stoppard, to all intents and purposes a young English schoolboy. Eugen sought to follow, on a ship bound for Australia. A woman coming out of the first New York production bumped into its author and asked “What’s it about?” According to legend, he replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.”. “I like them to sit with their backs to the engine, and only later to find out where they were going.” In plays famed for their wordsmithery, there can be a surprising amount of silence. Things soon went from good to better. Hermione Leeâs Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. Tom Stoppard has written some of the most important plays of the past 50 years. Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. 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. The mother and two young children were rushed on to a ship that was about to leave; they ended up in Bombay. Stoppard revised and cut ruthlessly as his plays were in rehearsal and even during their run. 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 may be that gilded lilies just aren’t my thing, but I would admire this at times brilliant portrait even more without these showbiz equivalents of the Court Circular. 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 is the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. He was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish doctor and his wife. 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). Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. The father was to follow, but he never did: the Japanese sank the ship he was on. Kenneth Tynan was on the phone on Monday on behalf of the National Theatre, where he was dramaturg and adviser. Eight months later, the Nazis invaded and the family fled to Singapore. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. 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”. In 1942 they attempted to flee again when the Japanese invaded. The worldâs population was and there were an estimated babies born â¦ (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.). After further peregrinations around India, Marta Sträussler and her two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the boys went to an English school. It is how I will always see him.He is a great playwright, and this is a great biography. Delivery charges may apply. Buy this book. This is a hugely impressive work. At the very least, his work reveals a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of existence. There their mother met and later married an English officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought the whole family to England in February 1946. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. Stoppardâs life will not need writing again. 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). It all makes the audience pay attention; occasionally it makes them pay dearly. Ira Nadel's biography of Tom Stoppard is pleasantly straightforward: largely descriptive, covering a great deal of Stoppard's personal and professional life, without too much hypothesizing or analysis about what possibly motivates and moves the artist. Leeâs book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a â¦ Marta told her sons very little about the family background and the circumstances of their flight from Czechoslovakia; Stoppard was in his late 50s before he fully understood that he was Jewish and that many of his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis. Faber reprinted the text 23 times in the next 30 years, going on to sell a further half a million copies between 2001 and 2008 alone. This is a hugely impressive work. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. You could lie there â¦ A brilliant 23-year-old actor named Peter O’Toole starred in Hamlet and Waiting for Godot. But the social side is only the half of it. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Perhaps that’s more than enough: what higher praise could a playwright want? 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 young Stoppard chose to become a journalist. Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. For both, he wrote some of his best parts and finally refuted the long-standing charge that he did not know how to write women. Tomáš Sträussler was born in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1937. 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. In 1993 Stoppard (and his mother, in her early 80s, who accompanied him) asked of a relative who met with them in London: “I mean, how Jewish were we?” To which she replied: “You were completely Jewish.”. 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. Not all readers will take quite as indulgent a view of Stoppard as Lee does. 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. Other plays followed, roughly every four or five years. At other times nothing happens, though as Beckett might have said, it does that sometimes. 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. ... an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. Stoppard and his first wife, Josie, married young and had two sons. Lee's biography is full of Stoppard's voice, humour and thoughts about life: there's a Stoppard joke on almost every page. From left: Wilf Scolding (Septimus Hodge), Larrington Walker (Richard Noakes), Dakota Blue Richards (Thomasina Coverly) and Kirsty Besterman (Lady Croom) in. Hermione Lee has done as well anybody could to bring this fundamentally private man to light. "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. The fact that his plays are so immediately recognisable, so unmistakably Stoppardian, may contribute to both sides of his reputation. Pinter permanently enlarged our sense of what a play can be. In December 2014 my wife and I glimpsed him as we passed London’s National Theatre. It was news to me that Tom Stoppard and Sinéad Cusack had a relationship. Certainly, “all through the 1980s he would be a whole-hearted supporter and admirer of Thatcher”. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. Stoppard emerges from this deeply sympathetic, even forgiving, biography as a shy man who has found a way to show off; a man who can’t quite believe his luck but can’t quite believe anything else, either. In 2013, the playwright Tom Stoppard approached Oxford professor Hermione Lee and asked her to write his biography. Tom Stoppard & Hermione Lee in Conversation Hermione Lee interviewed Stoppard for the London Library on 6 May 2016, and in conjunction with the Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Trust and TORCH: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities on 19 May 2016 (see video). His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play. Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousness. 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. On Tom Stoppardâs birthday. Stoppard has given us wonderful nights out in the theatre, occasions that make us think as well as laugh (and sometimes cry). In truth, he seems always to have been more maverick than doctrinaire. But the core of Tom Stoppard remains hermetic, sealed. His parents were non-observant Jews, members of a long-established community. "Tom Stoppard: A Life" by Ira Nadel The author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" has overcome youthful tragedy to live a charmed life -- â¦ Knopf, $35 (896p) ISBN 978-0-451-49322-4. The luck remained with Tom as he grew up in England. In a sense, though, those are its strengths. 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. âI am a very private sort of person.â It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. Sinéad Cusack made it clear from the start that she intended staying married to Jeremy Irons and close to their two sons. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”. In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has his Oscar Wilde character describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes”. 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ran for three years in that production; there have been countless revivals, translations and adaptations. Leeâs book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a â¦ Felicity Kendall had just emerged from her own marriage and wished to preserve her independence. Jumpers followed in 1972, mixing farce with metaphysics. Several years later, the attractive 35-year-old widow was wooed and won by a British army officer, Maj Kenneth Stoppard, who promptly brought his new family from India to England in 1946. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". 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. 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. Bristol, where the family now lived, was a hive of theatre. 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. âLife in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. “Tom Stoppard: The Years of Struggle” would be quite a short one-act piece: he was not yet 28 when the RSC bought an option on his idea for a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of the minor characters in Hamlet. It all helped to sustain a life filled with country houses and Concorde flights, marriages and not-marriages, lots of parties and an awful lot of cigarettes. 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. Stoppard went on to lengthy relationships with two actresses. As Lee puts it: “She never told her sons, either that she was Jewish or that most of her family had perished in the Holocaust.”, The Straüssler family background took decades to surface properly. 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. 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. Hermione Leeâs Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. He has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as “England’s most rightwing playwright”. 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. This is a hugely impressive work. His politics have been a particular sticking-point. The more old-school Laurence Olivier took a bit more persuading but was won around by Tynan, and the play was a triumph. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty, First published: Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 06:00. It was torpedoed and sunk; they never saw him again. They also had two sons, the second of whom, Ed, is a successful actor. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. 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