NOTES ON RECENT READING
Hermione Lee’s TOM STOPPARD:
A LIFE
By Samuel L. Leiter
Who would you say is currently the English-speaking world’s foremost living playwright? After reading Hermione Lee’s nearly two-inch thick Tom Stoppard: A Life (New York: Vintage, 2020, 872 pp.), I find it hard to think of anyone as worthy of the appellation as that magnificent work’s eponymous subject. For sheer output, consistency, intellectual and artistic rigor, commercial success, and critical renown, it’s hard to come up with anyone comparable, regardless of what language they write in. The man has surely won more titles and accolades than any other contemporary playwright, and it would seem only a matter of time before he receives, as did the late Harold Pinter, his closest competitor but also good friend, the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Stoppard (who distrusted biographies) selected Lee for the task, but her biography, while
highly complimentary, is far from hagiographic. The picture she paints of this
unusually successful writer, as treasured a human being as he is an artist, displays
not only his genius but his weak spots. You put down this immense work of research,
description, and analysis feeling you not only understand Stoppard better (if
not, given his proclivity for intellectual hijinks, completely), but also wish
to revisit his work, especially the ones you’ve never seen or read.
As has become increasingly familiar in recent years, Stoppard, born Tomás or Tomik Straüssler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, was an infant when his family—non-observant Jews—was forced to flee the Nazis. He spent his early years in Singapore and then India, raised in Darjeeling by his mother, Marta, after his father, a doctor, was killed. Marta’s marriage to the British officer Kenneth Stoppard allowed the family to move to England where Tom Stoppard and his siblings grew up, considering themselves English, with few ties to their Czech language or culture, much less their Jewish heritage.
Lee goes into great detail about Stoppard’s education (he never attended university, it should be noted), his early career as a journalist in Bristol, and his transition to writing plays, a trade at which—with 1968’s internationally popular Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—he quickly found success. The book explains not only the production circumstances of all his plays, but discusses their often difficult to grasp subjects: quantum physics. Fermat’s Last Theory, or the nature of consciousness, anyone?
Stoppard’s theatrical playwriting output is extensive, of
course, with widely known (and often revived) titles such as Travesties,
The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The
Coast of Utopia, Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Hard Problem, and Leopoldstadt.
But he also wrote major screenplays for the movies and TV, like Shakespeare
in Love (co-authored with Marc Norman) and TV’s Parade’s End (based
on novels by Ford Madox Ford), contributed (often uncredited) to many others, adapted
numerous European plays by writers like Schnitzler and Chekhov, wrote important
radio dramas, and produced countless articles, speeches, and other written
works. A key critical component Lee comments on is the balance in his dramatic
writing between intellectual and emotional concerns; critics were so used to
his brainy preoccupations they were often surprised when Stoppard’s plays began
to stir their hearts.
His constant traveling to conferences and productions of his plays in far-flung corners of the globe are exhausting to read about; one can picture just how tiring they must have been for Stoppard, but he seems to have thought little of hopping on a plane to the States for a weekend of rehearsals or some other event before returning to the UK. Often, he’d be involved in several major projects at the same time, yet his stamina never seems to have failed him. Lee offers an excellent view of how, with the help of his topnotch PA, he was able to juggle so many balls.
Lee recounts Stoppard’s two marriages (to Miriam Stern and Sabrina Guinness, both exceptional women), his love affairs (most notably with the brilliant actresses Felicity Kendal and Sinéad Cusack), his family life with his parents (warmly loving mother, emotionally distanced stepfather), his offspring (one of whom, Ed Stoppard, is a noted leading man), and his countless friends in high places. Many of these persons are themselves well-described so you get a remarkably rounded picture of Stoppard’s life circumstances. Even his various homes are examined closely, making it possible to imagine what visiting him might have been like.
Theatre buffs will relish Lee’s coverage of his rehearsals, noting what it was like for actors and directors to work with Stoppard, who, while his own directing experiences were limited, was a keen participant in both new productions and revivals of his work. He was an inveterate reviser, his published plays often undergoing several editions to reflect changes made in recent productions. Sometimes he had to be asked to limit his advice to actors because it could interfere with the actual directors’ authority. But the book also offers invaluable insights into the working methods of leading directors, like Jack O’Brien, Trevor Nunn, and David Leveaux.
Also of interest are Stoppard’s political views. Although always taking a balanced view of life’s realities, his long-term tendency—based largely on his gratitude to England for his being able to live a charmed life there—was to favor Tory views, even to the extent of being a friend and supporter of Margaret Thatcher. Later, he moved more leftward, although never radically. Among his chief political activities, in which he was deeply involved, were those on behalf of writers in oppressive societies, which was one reason he became close friends with Czech playwright/political leader Václav Havel.
For all his enormous success, financially and otherwise, Stoppard appears to be a generous, modest, even self-deprecating man, devoted to his loved ones. Apart from what the tabloids made of his love life (Sinéad Cusack remained married to Jeremy Irons while consorting with the playwright), his life was generally scandal free. Considered handsome and dashing in his salad days, and a buddy of leading celebrities (like Mick Jagger, to whom his appearance was sometimes likened), he was ripe for paparazzi exploitation, but managed to keep his head without falling into the typical patterns of drug or alcohol abuse; his chain-smoking, however, was in a class by itself.
For many, the most intensely gripping part of Stoppard’s life was his eventual exploration of his Czech origins and Jewish roots. Having generally ignored his religious heritage, his own mother having willfully chosen to keep silent about it, Stoppard only began to dig into his Jewish roots in the 1990s. He made contact with surviving Czech relatives, discovering how many of his family members died in the Holocaust. This all proved fodder for his late plays Rock ‘n’ Roll and, most spectacularly, Leopoldstadt. Although I already was familiar with the story, reading it here brought tears to my eyes.
Hermione Lee’s book covers Stoppard’s life through the London success of the latter play, which would go on to an equally acclaimed New York production, and concludes with a fascinating discourse by Lee on the process of writing her biography, as well as a summation of her subject's personality. If Tom Stoppard is, indeed, the world’s foremost living playwright, I can’t imagine a better way to get to know the guy than through this thorough portrait of his life and work.
