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. Hermione Lee is the award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth. 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). He has been described, perhaps inaccurately, as “England’s most rightwing playwright”. Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee review – an exceptional biography An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the … 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”. 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. One of the main lessons Stoppard learned from Beckett and Pinter was the dramatic effectiveness of withholding information. The luck remained with Tom as he grew up in England. The Stoppards’ marriage was reduced to their waving at each other as they individually passed through international airports; they eventually split. 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). It was news to me that Tom Stoppard and Sinéad Cusack had a relationship. You'd have a chance at least. Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distillation of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go to university. 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. It was a runaway success of extraordinary proportions. 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. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. And she appreciates the theatre and its lore without being a luvvie. Then on Sunday Bill Bryden in the Observer proclaimed it “the most brilliant debut since John Arden’s”. Tom Stoppard | Biography, Plays, Movies, & Facts | Britannica 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. It’s hard to know how literary history will treat Stoppard. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. 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. Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. Tomáš Sträussler was born in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1937. Stoppard’s biographer shows with finesse the slow process by which this occurred. Listen to the latest episodes of Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee on BBC Sounds A brilliant 23-year-old actor named Peter O’Toole starred in Hamlet and Waiting for Godot. 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. 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. 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. Yet, even so, his reputation may never quite shake off that lingering reservation that has dogged him throughout his career: “It’s all very clever, but ...”. The young Stoppard chose to become a journalist. 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 Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. Tom Stoppard: A Life was featured as the "Book of the Week". Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer “I simply don’t like revealing myself,” Tom Stoppard once said. His parents were non-observant Jews, members of a long-established community. 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. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Hermione Lee has written an authorized biography of playwright, screenwriter, translator, and man of letters Tom Stoppard, called Tom Stoppard: A Life.It was released in the United Kingdom on October 1st and should appear in the United States on February 23, 2021. Stoppard was born TomáÅ¡ Straussler, in Zlín, a city dominated by the shoe manufacturing industry, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. 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. Cusack was friendly with Sabrina Guinness, who started seeing Stoppard and, when she learned they were to be married, remarked: “You know, Sabrina has always been looking for a good man; and now she’s got the best man in the world.”. Other plays followed, roughly every four or five years. Not all readers will take quite as indulgent a view of Stoppard as Lee does. They also had two sons, the second of whom, Ed, is a successful actor. He was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish doctor and his wife. The complete review's Review: . The marriage with Miriam was the meeting of two glamorous, professionally driven people, and her media career as a health correspondent prospered along with his. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”. This is a hugely impressive work. 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. Eugen sought to follow, on a ship bound for Australia. But the core of Tom Stoppard remains hermetic, sealed. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre. His biographer clearly shows he is fundamentally happiest when he is on his own, working through the night on his latest play. Pinter permanently enlarged our sense of what a play can be. The past was behind them and not mentioned. 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. 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. 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. Stoppard may not have gone to university, but he remained a scholar in his own creative way when it came to preparing a play. Stoppard went on to lengthy relationships with two actresses. Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a rare empathy and understanding of human nature. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Tom Stoppard: A Life Hermione Lee. In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has his Oscar Wilde character describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes”. No Hiding by Rob Kearney: Is this a memoir or a marketing tool? I saw it that year as a student. The mother and two young children were rushed on to a ship that was about to leave; they ended up in Bombay. You could lie there … Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. The final page of the play is a direct transcription of the questions Stoppard asked about various family members. 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. 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. Readers who, by contrast, like their biographies to romp along from lunch party to lunch party may find that Lee’s long analyses of the plays clog the action, but for my money her astute and unfailingly clear accounts of Stoppard’s complex creations are among the great strengths of this exceptional biography. He is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. 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, … 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ran for three years in that production; there have been countless revivals, translations and adaptations. (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.). He associated the country with the freedom of the individual and of the press. It is striking that a writer who has been so popular and who has been showered with almost every imaginable kind of honour, from the Oscars to the Order of Merit, can still attract such mixed notices. Tom Stoppard Life Family Your The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. “I am a very private sort of person.” It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. When it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe it was rubbished by the dailies: “Inexplicable throughout” (Daily Mail). 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. Marta and her two sons, Petr and Tomás, went on a ship to – they thought – Australia but it ended up in India. The Books Quiz: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent is set in which county? Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. From left: Wilf Scolding (Septimus Hodge), Larrington Walker (Richard Noakes), Dakota Blue Richards (Thomasina Coverly) and Kirsty Besterman (Lady Croom) in. Running time: 60 minutes 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. 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). 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 list goes on, right up to his latest play, Leopoldstadt, whose successful opening run was cut short by the lockdown. It would be interesting see him at work on this script of his life: as a master of concision, he would probably cut a good deal, while revising the ending right up to the penultimate performance. The pandemic is not the first time Stoppard has confronted global disaster. “Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. But he seems, admirably, to have decided to put his trust in the “mesh” and to allow his biographer a completely free hand. To set against this, there have been numerous revivals of his best plays where critics, depending on the production, have raved all over again, sometimes claiming to see depths that they missed on a first viewing. In truth, he seems always to have been more maverick than doctrinaire. Quoting that line in his biography (twice) is a nice touch. 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. They left hurriedly that April, travelling to Singapore, where Dr Sträussler had been offered a post in a hospital. 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. 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. Stoppard and his first wife, Josie, married young and had two sons. 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 … 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. The fact that his plays are so immediately recognisable, so unmistakably Stoppardian, may contribute to both sides of his reputation. Stoppard revised and cut ruthlessly as his plays were in rehearsal and even during their run. The answers were almost all the same: “Auschwitz.”. But the social side is only the half of it. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. Kenneth Tynan was on the phone on Monday on behalf of the National Theatre, where he was dramaturg and adviser. 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. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Jan Antonín BaÅ¥a, transferred his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Eur… Lee’s book has the scope of a novel; it is superbly researched and written with a … 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. 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. It was torpedoed and sunk; they never saw him again. Some were successful; others less so. At the very least, his work reveals a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of existence. The father was to follow, but he never did: the Japanese sank the ship he was on. Tom Stoppard: A Life also details Sir Tom's 10-year relationship with Irish actress Sinéad Cusack, which ended in 2007 after Cusack was reunited with the … On Tom Stoppard’s birthday. There their mother met and later married an English officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought the whole family to England in February 1946. Tom Stoppard, photographed in 1976: a shy man who has found a way to show off. ... an introduction to biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. 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. Stoppard has given us wonderful nights out in the theatre, occasions that make us think as well as laugh (and sometimes cry). This is a hugely impressive work. 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. 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. In December 2014 my wife and I glimpsed him as we passed London’s National Theatre. Hermione Lee sheds light on a private man, from his Czech Jewish past to his marriages, Tom Stoppard in London, 2018. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. It is also a challenging read, partly because of its excessive length and partly because it bulges with often needless detail. 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. 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.”. Knopf, $35 (896p) ISBN 978-0-451-49322-4. 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Both a pitch-perfect analysis of the great playwright’s body of work and a scintillating account of a remarkable life lived to its fullest, this biography of Tom Stoppard is another triumph for the incomparable skills of Hermione Lee. His most recent plays, exploring his hitherto suppressed European heritage, richly deserve to be seen in Dublin. 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. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty, First published: Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 06:00. Audiences become puzzled, discomfited, but also engaged. 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. Eight months later, the Nazis invaded and the family fled to Singapore. In 2013, the playwright Tom Stoppard approached Oxford professor Hermione Lee and asked her to write his biography. Wikpedia at 20: Did you know Will Ferrell was once not killed in a paragliding incident? In 1942 they attempted to flee again when the Japanese invaded. Lee's biography is full of Stoppard's voice, humour and thoughts about life: there's a Stoppard joke on almost every page. But this is her first biography of a man, her first living subject and her first playwright. "Tom Stoppard: A Life" by Ira Nadel The author of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" has overcome youthful tragedy to live a charmed life -- … It all makes the audience pay attention; occasionally it makes them pay dearly. “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. 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? Tom Stoppard photographed by Jane Bown in 1967. 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. After further peregrinations around India, Marta Sträussler and her two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the boys went to an English school. Lee had published acclaimed lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. 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. 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. At other times nothing happens, though as Beckett might have said, it does that sometimes. 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. 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. The more old-school Laurence Olivier took a bit more persuading but was won around by Tynan, and the play was a triumph. "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. His politics have been a particular sticking-point. Felicity Kendall had just emerged from her own marriage and wished to preserve her independence. It is hard to imagine a more distinguished biographical pairing than a book on Sir Tom Stoppard written by Dame Hermione Lee. 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’s biography of Tom Stoppard is an “astute and unfailingly clear” commentary on the playwright’s life and work. Delivery charges may apply. In the event, Tom Stoppard: A Life shows that he has chosen well. 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. There have also been repeated grumbles that his are the kinds of play you can only see once. Increasingly, he wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. • Tom Stoppard: A Life is published by Faber (£30). “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. 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. These challenging works each receive detailed analysis here. 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. Certainly, “all through the 1980s he would be a whole-hearted supporter and admirer of Thatcher”. When the Japanese army arrived in February 1942, the family had to take flight once more. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee draws on hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and long conversations with Stoppard himself. Bristol, where the family now lived, was a hive of theatre. 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About to leave ; they ended up in Bombay rushed on to a Jewish and! Observer “I simply don’t like revealing myself, ” Tom Stoppard approached Oxford professor hermione Lee and asked to... The dramatic effectiveness of withholding information biography, plays, exploring his suppressed. February 1942, the second of whom, Ed, is a actor!

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