Stoppard, Sir Thomas

▪ 1998

      Few playwrights had been as celebrated for their virtuoso command of the English language as Czech-born dramatist Tom Stoppard. A master of the "serious comedy," he had captivated theatregoers for more than 30 years with his plays of ideas. When The Invention of Love captured the London Evening Standard award for best play in November 1997, it marked the seventh time that Stoppard—also a three-time Tony award winner—had been presented with the honour and was the culmination of a year in which he had received (in June) the personal honour of a knighthood.

      Born July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czech. (now Czech Republic), Tomas Straussler was the youngest son of a company physician who was transferred to Singapore in 1939. When the Japanese attacked Singapore in 1941, Straussler remained there and was killed, whereas his wife and two sons fled to India. In 1946 his widow married a British army officer, who moved the family to Bristol, Eng. At age 17, after taking his stepfather's name, Stoppard launched a career in journalism. Working first in Bristol (1954-60) and later in London, he wrote theatre and film criticism among other assignments. In the 1960s Stoppard wrote his first play, A Walk on the Water, as well as several short radio plays and short stories. A novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, was published in 1966. His big break came the following year when a National Theatre production of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead enjoyed wide acclaim. Based on two minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern became a classic of modern theatre and established a pattern of borrowing from history and literature that would become one of Stoppard's trademarks.

      Unlike the works of many of his British contemporaries, Stoppard's early plays were not concerned with politics or class conflict. Instead, he became a master of witty wordplay and comic invention, through which he examined the myriad contradictions of experience and philosophy. Even as he was occasionally criticized for writing plays that lacked emotion or creating characters that existed primarily as mouthpieces for the his wide-ranging intellectual preoccupations, Stoppard created an astounding body of work that was as entertaining as it was enlightening. Outstanding works included Jumpers (1972), a metaphysical whodunnit; Travesties (1974), one man's account of V.I. Lenin, James Joyce, and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara in 1917 Zürich, Switz.; Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), his first political play; The Real Thing (1982), a romantic comedy about art and marriage; and Arcadia (1993), which brought together Fermat's Last Theorem, chaos theory, landscape architecture, and Lord Byron. Stoppard also wrote screenplays, notably for Brazil (1986) and Empire of the Sun (1987), and wrote and directed the 1991 film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It was the plays, however—the mounting of which had become national cultural occasions in Britain—for which he would be remembered.

JEFF WALLENFELDT

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