Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee — Fame, plays and plaudits

Our greatest living playwright, with a backstory as exciting, heartbreaking and glamorous as any drama, Tom Stoppard has long fought a losing battle against biography. After forgoing his infant identity as a Jewish Czech refugee from Nazism, he blithely reinvented himself as an Englishman. His early hits – Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties – fizz with ideas and showmanship but contain little that’s personal.

Mid-career trickles of revelation in The Real Thing broadened into streams in later works like Rock ‘n’ Roll, just as his apparent political disengagement crumbled when challenged by ongoing oppression in Eastern Europe. The 2020 run of his sprawling, richly moving exploration of his heritage, Leopoldstadt, was cut cruelly short by Covid. Now here’s Hermione Lee’s slab of a biography, conducted with the input and blessing of its 83-year-old subject, which covers the life and the work in meticulous detail. The big revelation is of a love affair with Sinead Cusack, then and now married to Jeremy Irons, which largely escaped tabloid attention through most of the 2000s. Stoppard’s romances – with second wife and TV doctor Miriam, with Felicity Kendal and latterly with third wife Sabrina Guinness – always attracted more attention than the average writer’s. But his love life is probably the least interesting thing about him.

Dr Eugen Sträussler and his wife Marta (aka Bobby) fled Zlin in 1939, then Singapore, with their sons Tomáš, two, and Petr, four. Eugen died en route to Australia when his ship was bombed. Bobby took the boys to Colombo, then Darjeeling, where she married a British officer, Ken Stoppard, without telling them. Transplanted to a British boarding school Tomáš fell in love with the English countryside, cricket and language. Incuriousness about his past mirrored Bobby’s reticence: he only learned in 1993 that he was Jewish and that three of Bobby’s sisters and many other relatives were murdered in concentration camps. As Lee points out, though Stoppard’s early writings are impersonal, they are full of characters who live double or dislocated lives.

‘Tom Stoppard’ left school at 17 and spent eight years as a journalist in Bristol and five as a tyro writer in London. Then Rosencranz, his existential riff on Hamlet, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival and transferred to the National Theatre in 1967. “What’s it about?” asked one baffled audience member. “It’s about to make me very rich,” Stoppard supposedly said. It transferred to New York and in 1968 was performed in 23 countries. The body of work that follows is extraordinary. Though his plays never lost their tricksiness or wit – the adjective ‘Stoppardian’ entered the OED in 1978 – their meditations on morality, philosophy, science and art became more grounded in human emotion. They range from 15-minute squibs like Cahoot’s Macbeth to the epic Coast of Utopia trilogy. Arcadia, from 1993, is his masterpiece.

He researches and rewrites obsessively. Long gaps between stage plays are filled with TV and radio scripts, films (Empire of the Sun, Enigma, his Oscar-winning rewrite of Shakespeare in Love) and uncredited, lucrative polishes on the likes of Hook and Beethoven. He has won numerous Evening Standard, Tony and Olivier awards, been awarded an OBE and the Order of Merit. He has two sons by his first wife Jose(YES) and two with Miriam. His evident enjoyment of wealth, fame and plaudits, and his 1980s support for Margaret Thatcher, riled some in the theatre.

Yet his talent for friendship encompassed Harold Pinter, Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Devonshire and Vaclav Havel, the playwright and dissident who became Czech president (and a sort of alter ego for Stoppard). He speaks out against censorship and oppression and on behalf of refugees. Lee’s biography captures Stoppard’s humour and kindness, his voracity for knowledge and his sociability. It throws light on his early life in London and his taste. When analysing the work Lee can get bogged down: the list of influences on Jumpers takes up most of page 236. And the writing could do with a bit more zest and brio. But anyone who wants to know about Stoppard will find most of the answers here. He’s succumbed to biography at last.

Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee (Faber, £30)