Early years
Stoppard was born
Tomá? Straussler, in Zlín, a "Shoe Town", in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. He was the son of Martha Beckova and Eugen Straüssler, a doctor with the Bata shoe company. Both parents were Jewish, though neither practising. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Tomá? Ba?a, helped re-post his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to various branches of his firm all over the world. On 15 March 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Straussler family fled to Singapore, one of the places Bata had a company.
Then, just before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, the two sons and their mother were sent on to Australia. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that, as a doctor, he would be needed in its defence. From there, in 1941, when Tomas was five, the three were evacuated to Darjeeling in India. The boys attended the Mount Hermon American multi-racial school where Tomas became Tom and his brother Petr became Peter. The father planned to follow the family later. In the book
Tom Stoppard in conversation, Stoppard tells how his father died in Japanese captivity, a prisoner of war although Straussler is also commonly reported to have drowned on board a ship bombed by Japanese forces.
The boys' mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia. He discussed the disclosure in an interview (2008) with Maya Jaggi in
The Guardian:
Only in the early 1990s, after "the communists fell and the blind went up" did Stoppard learn from distant Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters. After his parents' deaths, he returned with his elder brother to Zlin in 1998, for the first time in almost 60 years. Writing in Talk magazine in 1999, he expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past. But he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."
In 1945, his mother Martha married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and, in 1946, after the war, moved the family to England. In the
Talk magazine article, Stoppard recalls his stepfather's belief that "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life", telling his small stepson: "Don't you realise that I made you British?" The Guardian interview continues:
He, [Stoppard] once wrote ironically of his childhood self, that he was "coming on well as an honorary Englishman". The world may be more open now to layered identities, but his unease remains. "I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in", he says. "I find I put a foot wrong - it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history - and suddenly I'm there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket." His characters, he notes, are "constantly being addressed by the wrong name, with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names".
Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later completed his education at Pocklington School in East Riding, Yorkshire. He left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for
Western Daily Press in Bristol, never having received a university education. He remained there from 1954 until 1958, when the
Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard the position of feature writer, humor columnist, and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theatre. At the Bristol Old Vic — at the time a well-regarded regional repertory company — Stoppard formed friendships with director John Boorman and actor Peter O'Toole early in their careers. In Bristol, he became known more for his strained attempts at humor and unstylish clothes than for his writing.
Career
By 1960, he had completed his first play,
A Walk on the Water, which was later re-packaged as 1968's
Enter a Free Man. Stoppard noted that the work owed much to Robert Bolt's
Flowering Cherry and Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman. Within a week after sending
A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard received his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives." His first play was optioned, staged in Hamburg, then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963.
From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for
Scene magazine, writing reviews and interviews both under his name and the pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's
Scoop). In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which later evolved into his Tony-winning play
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In the following years, Stoppard produced several works for radio, television and the theatre, including
"M" is for Moon Among Other Things (1964),
A Separate Peace (1966) and
If You're Glad I'll Be Frank (1966).
On 11 April 1967 ... following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival ... the opening of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in a National Theatre production at the Old Vic made Stoppard an overnight success.
Over the next ten years, in addition to writing some of his own works, Stoppard translated various plays into English, including works by Slawomir Mrozek, Johann Nestroy, Arthur Schnitzler, and Václav Havel. It was at this time that Stoppard became influenced by the works of Polish and Czech absurdists. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group, a far-from-serious French movement to improve actors' stage technique through science.
Human rights activism
In his early works, Stoppard had avoided political and social issues, once going so far as to declare, "I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness." However, by 1977, Stoppard had become concerned with human rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe. In February 1977, he visited the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries with a member of Amnesty International. In June, Stoppard met Vladimir Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met dissident playwright and future president Václav Havel. Stoppard became involved with
Index on Censorship, Amnesty International, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human rights. He was also instrumental in translating Havel's works into English.
The Tom Stoppard Prize was created in 1983 (in Stockholm, under the Charter 77 Foundation) and is awarded to authors of Czech origin. In August 2005, Stoppard visited Minsk to give a seminar on playwriting and to learn first-hand about human rights and political problems in Belarus.
Stoppard's passion for human rights influenced several of his works. He wrote
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) based on a request by André Previn; it was inspired by a meeting with a Russian exile. In
Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) and
Squaring the Circle (1984), he attacks the oppressive old regimes of Eastern Europe.
In a 2007 interview, Stoppard described himself as a "timid libertarian". In the year of Margaret Thatcher's election, Stoppard confided to Paul Delaney: "I'm a conservative with a small c. I am a conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre."
Stoppard serves on the advisory board of the magazine
Standpoint, and was instrumental in its foundation, giving the opening speech at its launch.
Relationships
Stoppard has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965—1972), a nurse, and to Miriam Stoppard (
née Stern and subsequently Miriam Moore-Robinson, 1972—1992), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each marriage, including the actor Ed Stoppard and Will Stoppard, who is married to violinist Linzi Stoppard.
