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. In 2013, the playwright Tom Stoppard approached Oxford professor Hermione Lee and asked her to write his biography. 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. Hermione Lee has done as well anybody could to bring this fundamentally private man to light. 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. Hermione Lee is the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. He has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as “England’s most rightwing playwright”. In a sense, though, those are its strengths. 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. 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. Not all readers will take quite as indulgent a view of Stoppard as Lee does. 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. In a sense Other plays followed, roughly every four or five years. Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousness. 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 was torpedoed and sunk; they never saw him again. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … 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.”. 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. They left hurriedly that April, travelling to Singapore, where Dr Sträussler had been offered a post in a hospital. Buy Tom Stoppard: A Life Main by Lee, Professor Dame Hermione (ISBN: 9780571314430) from Amazon's Book Store. 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.”. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. The world’s population was and there were an estimated babies born … After further peregrinations around India, Marta Sträussler and her two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the boys went to an English school. 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. His most recent plays, exploring his hitherto suppressed European heritage, richly deserve to be seen in Dublin. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". His parents were non-observant Jews, members of a long-established community. In truth, he seems always to have been more maverick than doctrinaire. Sinéad Cusack made it clear from the start that she intended staying married to Jeremy Irons and close to their two sons. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. Writing the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love brought in the odd penny, too (plus an Oscar), as did a lot of other film work and adaptations. 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. 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. 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, … Kenneth Tynan was on the phone on Monday on behalf of the National Theatre, where he was dramaturg and adviser. Hermione Lee sheds light on a private man, from his Czech Jewish past to his marriages, Tom Stoppard in London, 2018. 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Then on Sunday Bill Bryden in the Observer proclaimed it “the most brilliant debut since John Arden’s”. Tom Stoppard: A Life Hermione Lee. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ran for three years in that production; there have been countless revivals, translations and adaptations. “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. Tomás Sträussler became Tom Stoppard, to all intents and purposes a young English schoolboy. 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. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. On Tom Stoppard’s birthday. 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. 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. His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play. In his most recent plays, Stoppard has turned from the matter of England, which preoccupied him for decades, to examine his European heritage: first, his Czech origins in 2006’s Rock’n’Roll, where he imagines an alternative existence for himself if he had returned from England to live in Czechoslovakia; and now in Leopoldstadt, where the playwright contemplates the fate of those family members who were not lucky enough to escape. Lee had published acclaimed lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. Stoppard may not have gone to university, but he remained a scholar in his own creative way when it came to preparing a play. These challenging works each receive detailed analysis here. The past was behind them and not mentioned. ... an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. 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. 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. At the very least, his work reveals a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of existence. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre. The complete review's Review: . 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. Lee’s biography is perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish and very long. 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 is a towering and beloved literary figure. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee review – an exceptional biography An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the … The mother and two young children were rushed on to a ship that was about to leave; they ended up in Bombay. Stoppard’s life will not need writing again. 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. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. 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). The Books Quiz: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent is set in which county? Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … 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. He associated the country with the freedom of the individual and of the press. “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. "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. 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. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. He was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish doctor and his wife. 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. “I am a very private sort of person.” It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. It is hard to imagine a more distinguished biographical pairing than a book on Sir Tom Stoppard written by Dame Hermione Lee. The luck remained with Tom as he grew up in England. 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. Eight months later, the Nazis invaded and the family fled to Singapore. 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). Tom Stoppard photographed by Jane Bown in 1967. 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. Some were successful; others less so. It all makes the audience pay attention; occasionally it makes them pay dearly. 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. There have also been repeated grumbles that his are the kinds of play you can only see once. 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. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee draws on hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and long conversations with Stoppard himself. The more old-school Laurence Olivier took a bit more persuading but was won around by Tynan, and the play was a triumph. In December 2014 my wife and I glimpsed him as we passed London’s National Theatre. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. In 1942 they attempted to flee again when the Japanese invaded. The answers were almost all the same: “Auschwitz.”. 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. Stoppard and his first wife, Josie, married young and had two sons. 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? 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. 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. 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. I saw it that year as a student. Tom Stoppard | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. The list goes on, right up to his latest play, Leopoldstadt, whose successful opening run was cut short by the lockdown. The pandemic is not the first time Stoppard has confronted global disaster. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. Quoting that line in his biography (twice) is a nice touch. Tom Stoppard has written some of the most important plays of the past 50 years. 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. The life of the man behind the plays is familiar from countless interviews and profiles, but Hermione Lee has been allowed to go backstage, enabling her to tell the story in unmatchable detail. 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