Lost in an ideal world

Shining out of the carpeted darkness of the chairman's room at the National Theatre is a painting by Eduardo Paolozzi. Hot bands of colour throb with vivid complexity, "a host", according to a discreet note by the artist, "of metaphors from the language of physics, biology and social life". The jostling geometries of tiny elements, for all their playful appearance, merge into the formal unity of art.

The plays of Tom Stoppard, glittering, dense, decorative, share a similar mosaic excitement. All his creative life he has feasted on such metaphors, from early successes (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974)) to Hapgood, Arcadia and The Invention of Love in recent years. His world of reference expands to include history, poetry, philosophy, portraiture and landscape gardening. The significance of single components, whether words in a play or the individual in society, intrigues him.

That this same room normally belongs to his ex-wife's new husband (Miriam Stoppard is married to Sir Christopher Hogg, chairman of the NT, of which Stoppard is a board member) adds a piquant surreality to proceedings. He might even savour the irony of being one of the cast for a change.

After a brief absence since he wrote the film script for Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard is back in the public eye. Next month he will be 65. Previews for Voyage, the first play in his new The Coast of Utopia trilogy, begin at the National next week. Today, an unauthorised biography, by Ira Nadel, is published. These Stoppardian coincidences could hardly interest him less, he maintains. Age bores him, as does his personal history. He is politely indifferent to the book. Contrary to reviewers' assumptions, he gave Nadel no assistance beyond a single conversation over a drink in San Francisco a few years ago.

"I've just received my copy. How is it so big? I haven't read it. It's nothing to do with me. I'm not a self-examiner. Nor am I trying to escape from who I am. It's all there in the work. Nadel's a pleasant, respectable chap. He has chatted up my family and friends and some elderly aunts. I didn't tell them not to speak. It didn't occur to me to issue embargos. He asked me if I'd co-operate. I said, 'I don't mind what you do, old chap, but you're on your own.'"

The book's emphasis on Stoppard's complicated early history doesn't match his own, almost dismissive view of those years. He was born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, on 3 July 1937. Escaping the Nazis, his family moved around the Far East, arriving in Britain in 1946. By then his father had died and his mother remarried (an English major, named Stoppard). Only half a century later did the playwright learn the full circumstances of his Jewish background. This supposed mixed identity has become the inevitable cliché by which his writing is explained. Back in the 1970s, the critic Kenneth Tynan, who as literary adviser to the National first brought Stoppard's work there, reminded himself in his diary always to bear in mind "that (Stoppard) is an émigré".

"What on earth did Tynan, or anyone else who says such things, mean? Am I supposed to have a greater sense of irony because I'm Czech, as if the English aren't more famous than anyone for their irony? It's the Americans who don't have an irony button on their machines. It's true I did go back to Zlin about five years ago. It was moving, of course, to learn of my origins. But it doesn't change who I am. I suppose I do have a vague antipathy about unpacking myself. What I enjoy is writing, being with writers, rehearsing, the fun, the fear of a new work. That's what counts. In trying to expose all these layers of self-examination, everyone ignores that aspect."

To his list of pleasures he might have added working at the National. That association so perceptively initiated by Tynan has now lasted three-and-a-half decades, during which time some 10 of his plays - variously premieres, revivals, translations - have been performed. His latest, The Coast of Utopia, directed by Trevor Nunn, consists of three self-contained plays set in mid-19th century Russia and described as "an epic story of romantics and revolutionaries" - principally the socialist Alexander Herzen - and their quest for an ideal society. Stoppard agrees he has always been anti-Utopian.

" perhaps not so much anti as sceptical. Utopias in general don t have a good track record. I write plays about metaphorical possibilities rather than out of a set of principles. In this respect he has sometimes been pigeon-holed with Harold Pinter as a Right-wing playwright in that lazy filing system that grouped a younger generation (David Hare, Howard Brenton) as Left-wing agit-prop writers.

It's true I did support Mrs Thatcher over her stand against the print unions in the newspaper industry. She and Rupert Murdoch stood up to them. It changed Fleet Street for ever. I love newspapers (he started out, straight from school, as a journalist in Bristol). It doesn't make me a Thatcherite. She had no feeling for the arts."