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Tom Stoppard: A Life
With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee builds a metiucously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights.
Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he's ever lived in, every piece of writing he's ever done, and every play and film he's ever worked on; but in the end this is the story of a complex, elusive and private man, which tells you an enormous amount about him but leaves you, also, with the fascinating mystery of his ultimate unknowability.
Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he's ever lived in, every piece of writing he's ever done, and every play and film he's ever worked on; but in the end this is the story of a complex, elusive and private man, which tells you an enormous amount about him but leaves you, also, with the fascinating mystery of his ultimate unknowability.
912 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2020
About the author
Hermione Lee
73 books136 followersHermione Lee grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
March 16, 2021
This book is extremely long, and I don’t usually read biographies, yet I stuck it out to the end because I enjoy Stoppard’s work. I like his plays, even when they make me feel stupid because I’m sure that I am missing 90% of what is going on. That is why I wanted to read this book. I hoped that it would explain his plays to me. It certainly accomplished that, plus it told me seemingly every single thing about Stoppard’s life - his childhood, wives, lovers, children, homes, awards, friends, screenplays, radio plays, TV series and especially the stage plays and their various productions.
This was more than I really wanted to know, but I do feel more informed about his plays now. I also feel less stupid now that I know that he sometimes spent years researching his plays. In preparation for one play he read books about Copernicus, Galileo and Aristotle while at the same time also reading Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, the Vienna School of Logical Positivism and B. F. Skinner for another play. I think that I can be excused for not being totally prepared for his plays and Stoppard is also just smarter than I am.
I loved learning where the inspiration for his plays came from. Sometimes they came from a single image which he kept at back of his mind for years. This is the initial image he had for Jumpers: A group of gymnasts are making a pyramid and there is a gunshot and one gymnast is blown out of the pyramid and the rest of the pyramid implodes into the hole that he left. In the play, the gymnasts were philosophers, and he turned philosophical arguments into theatrical entertainment.
If you are a fan of Stoppard I recommend this book. If you are not a fan, I’m not sure that his life would be all that interesting to you. 4.5 stars
This was more than I really wanted to know, but I do feel more informed about his plays now. I also feel less stupid now that I know that he sometimes spent years researching his plays. In preparation for one play he read books about Copernicus, Galileo and Aristotle while at the same time also reading Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, the Vienna School of Logical Positivism and B. F. Skinner for another play. I think that I can be excused for not being totally prepared for his plays and Stoppard is also just smarter than I am.
I loved learning where the inspiration for his plays came from. Sometimes they came from a single image which he kept at back of his mind for years. This is the initial image he had for Jumpers: A group of gymnasts are making a pyramid and there is a gunshot and one gymnast is blown out of the pyramid and the rest of the pyramid implodes into the hole that he left. In the play, the gymnasts were philosophers, and he turned philosophical arguments into theatrical entertainment.
If you are a fan of Stoppard I recommend this book. If you are not a fan, I’m not sure that his life would be all that interesting to you. 4.5 stars
June 30, 2022
Some thoughts about Tom Stoppard: A Life:
The book began with promise. For the first 150 pages or so, it read like a novel and I was caught up in it. After that, things went south and I found myself reading repetitious accounts of Tom Stoppard's fascination with and pursuit of celebrity and celebrities; the comings and goings of various wives and lovers; and, worst of all, Hermione Lee's commentary (usually rather long winded) about most of his plays and screenplays. After a while, I found myself skimming much of that commentary.
It's fine for a biographer to have a partiality towards the subjects they're writing about. Ms. Lee is obviously a fan of Tom Stoppard's work and I have no problem with that. I did have concerns when she was writing about his politics (both personal and in his plays), his philandering, and the above mentioned pursuit of celebrity.
I wasn't interested in Mr. Stoppard's political views (though, unusually, his views shifted leftward as he aged, as opposed to the usual course) and, as far as plays go, I don't see or read a play in the hopes of being informed politically. If I'm looking for that, I'll read a newspaper or watch news on television, both of which I do less and less of these days. So I wasn't much interested in Ms. Lee's attempts to explain Mr. Stoppard's political views or the politics found or not found in his plays.
As for his philandering, Ms. Lee is basically non-judgmental. My opinion is that, due to his fame and fortune, Mr. Stoppard was the sexual equivalent of a rich kid in a candy shop, Perhaps that's being too judgmental, or perhaps not.
As far as the the pursuit of celebrity goes, Hermione Lee gives the impression that she's as much in love with it as Tom Stoppard is. Her gratuitous celebrity name dropping certainly creates that impression.
A personal thought - and perhaps one that's wrongheaded. Tom Stoppard is obviously an autodidact. He left school at 17 to begin a career as a journalist and didn't have a lot of formal education. Hermione Lee doesn't seem to have a definite opinion about this but, from what she writes, my impression is that he soaked up and learned from everything around him: books, films, plays, conversations with friends, etc., and became something of a self taught wizard. In some ways, he seems similar to a contemporary in the U.S., Bob Dylan.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on William Shakespeare, but I believe that one of the arguments that some hold to when arguing that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare is that the man didn't have the formal education necessary to write the plays. I'm not comparing William Shakespeare with Tom Stoppard (or Bob Dylan) and won't get into any argument except to offer the possibility that if it happened in our time, it might have happened then. As I say, just a thought and perhaps a very wrongheaded one.
Some quotes from early on in the book:
A comment from one of his early film reviews where he reviewed everything from Wajda to Hollywood blockbusters: "What interested him were films which brought serious material into the popular domain with truthfulness and excitement. He had no time for the Hollywood cleanup of a rough classic such as Huckleberry Finn. 'Huck is Huck and MGM is MGM and never the Twain do meet (apologies).'" It's not difficult to see to what this sort of thing led to.
Writing about Arnold Wesker, whom he admired as a playwright rather than as an evangelist:
"Art is not withheld from anyone. Like Mount Everest, it is there. The slopes are sprinkled with people shouting, 'Come on up, it's marvelous!' but...society is not by nature homogenous...The millions aren't dissatisfied...What it has got is football, films, the telly, and pools - and it likes them very much, thanks."
Loyalty to friends seems to have been a lifelong trait for Stoppard.
"As Stoppard said in 1972, 'I never had the moral character to pan a friend. I'll rephrase that. I had the moral character never to pan a friend.'"
I've enjoyed reading a number of Tom Stoppard's plays and the time I spent reading this book would have been better spent reading some of his plays which I haven't read or rereading some of the ones I have read.
In the end, the book tried to do too much and was much too long. It would have been a better book if there were less commentary on his plays and screenplays and fewer superfluous details about his life. It was certainly more than I ever wanted to know about Tom Stoppard. When I finished reading, I thought that a better title might have been Tom Stoppard: The Charmed Life of a Charmer.
The book began with promise. For the first 150 pages or so, it read like a novel and I was caught up in it. After that, things went south and I found myself reading repetitious accounts of Tom Stoppard's fascination with and pursuit of celebrity and celebrities; the comings and goings of various wives and lovers; and, worst of all, Hermione Lee's commentary (usually rather long winded) about most of his plays and screenplays. After a while, I found myself skimming much of that commentary.
It's fine for a biographer to have a partiality towards the subjects they're writing about. Ms. Lee is obviously a fan of Tom Stoppard's work and I have no problem with that. I did have concerns when she was writing about his politics (both personal and in his plays), his philandering, and the above mentioned pursuit of celebrity.
I wasn't interested in Mr. Stoppard's political views (though, unusually, his views shifted leftward as he aged, as opposed to the usual course) and, as far as plays go, I don't see or read a play in the hopes of being informed politically. If I'm looking for that, I'll read a newspaper or watch news on television, both of which I do less and less of these days. So I wasn't much interested in Ms. Lee's attempts to explain Mr. Stoppard's political views or the politics found or not found in his plays.
As for his philandering, Ms. Lee is basically non-judgmental. My opinion is that, due to his fame and fortune, Mr. Stoppard was the sexual equivalent of a rich kid in a candy shop, Perhaps that's being too judgmental, or perhaps not.
As far as the the pursuit of celebrity goes, Hermione Lee gives the impression that she's as much in love with it as Tom Stoppard is. Her gratuitous celebrity name dropping certainly creates that impression.
A personal thought - and perhaps one that's wrongheaded. Tom Stoppard is obviously an autodidact. He left school at 17 to begin a career as a journalist and didn't have a lot of formal education. Hermione Lee doesn't seem to have a definite opinion about this but, from what she writes, my impression is that he soaked up and learned from everything around him: books, films, plays, conversations with friends, etc., and became something of a self taught wizard. In some ways, he seems similar to a contemporary in the U.S., Bob Dylan.
I'm the furthest thing from an expert on William Shakespeare, but I believe that one of the arguments that some hold to when arguing that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare is that the man didn't have the formal education necessary to write the plays. I'm not comparing William Shakespeare with Tom Stoppard (or Bob Dylan) and won't get into any argument except to offer the possibility that if it happened in our time, it might have happened then. As I say, just a thought and perhaps a very wrongheaded one.
Some quotes from early on in the book:
A comment from one of his early film reviews where he reviewed everything from Wajda to Hollywood blockbusters: "What interested him were films which brought serious material into the popular domain with truthfulness and excitement. He had no time for the Hollywood cleanup of a rough classic such as Huckleberry Finn. 'Huck is Huck and MGM is MGM and never the Twain do meet (apologies).'" It's not difficult to see to what this sort of thing led to.
Writing about Arnold Wesker, whom he admired as a playwright rather than as an evangelist:
"Art is not withheld from anyone. Like Mount Everest, it is there. The slopes are sprinkled with people shouting, 'Come on up, it's marvelous!' but...society is not by nature homogenous...The millions aren't dissatisfied...What it has got is football, films, the telly, and pools - and it likes them very much, thanks."
Loyalty to friends seems to have been a lifelong trait for Stoppard.
"As Stoppard said in 1972, 'I never had the moral character to pan a friend. I'll rephrase that. I had the moral character never to pan a friend.'"
I've enjoyed reading a number of Tom Stoppard's plays and the time I spent reading this book would have been better spent reading some of his plays which I haven't read or rereading some of the ones I have read.
In the end, the book tried to do too much and was much too long. It would have been a better book if there were less commentary on his plays and screenplays and fewer superfluous details about his life. It was certainly more than I ever wanted to know about Tom Stoppard. When I finished reading, I thought that a better title might have been Tom Stoppard: The Charmed Life of a Charmer.
October 9, 2021
Before reading this if you asked me who is Tom Stoppard, I would have pointed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, now I know there’s a lot more to him than being a playwright and screenwriter.
What made this an amazing read are the in-depth coverage that touches on literature, the theatre process in the UK and US, politics and the movies. It also touches on the horrors of the Second World War and how important friends and family are to him.
Hermione Lee drew me in with her narrative of Tom Stoppard’s journey to discover his Polish background and the horror his family had lived through the war. I was also amused by her telling of Tom Stoppard’s stubbornness that would create a little ruffle with friends like Harold Pinter before things are smoothed out again. A strong theme that ran through the book was how Tom Stoppard is not prepared to sacrifice the freedom to speak, this was something that was important to him.
Some of this biography’s chapters are headed with a play by Tom Stoppard, these would cover that play’s creative process, his involvement at theatre rehearsals, and the play’s production including publishing it. Also, imagine my relief when I read how Tom Stoppard plays are a challenge to understand – remembering my early struggles to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It was also a surprise to discover his involvement with the movies and Hollywood as a script doctor. I would not have guessed the input he had in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Schindler’s List, and I was left with the impression that Stephen Spielberg had a hotline to him and called him when he wanted a script consultant on his movies.
I wanted to read this book because I’m interested about writers and their works. This, to my surprise, covers different forms of writing, not just theatre, as Tom Stoppard is an eclectic writer and also writes articles and fiction.
Some things that Hermione Lee shares are Tom Stoppard’s regret of missing a near chance of meeting Earnest Hemmingway (whom he was a big fan of); his collection of first editions; his lifestyle where he always kept his feet on the ground; the amount of research he did for every play; his interest in the usage of language; and influences to his writing which included his close friend Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
As I approached the ending, what was becoming apparent is the work that has gone into to composing this frank, honest and sensitive portrait. I thought Hermione Lee does this with objectivity and concludes how this was not easy when the writer is still living. I think she’s being modest, Tom Stoppard’s life is really, really complex but (somehow) Hermione Lee tells it in a coherent way that is easy to follow. I’m thinking in different hands I would not be walking away with such a clear picture of who Tom Stoppard is, where throughout his warmth and human spirit shines through.
When I first saw the length of this book at just under 1000 pages, I hesitated to borrow it from Libby via the library services. I was also unsure I could read it as it was only available as an epub, fortunately, and to my amazement, I got my old Kobo device working. When I finished reading, the book length was hard to believe as it was effortless. I was glad I found a way to read this – the combination of Tom Stoppard’s life and Hermione Lee’s writing made this an enjoyable read for me.
What made this an amazing read are the in-depth coverage that touches on literature, the theatre process in the UK and US, politics and the movies. It also touches on the horrors of the Second World War and how important friends and family are to him.
Hermione Lee drew me in with her narrative of Tom Stoppard’s journey to discover his Polish background and the horror his family had lived through the war. I was also amused by her telling of Tom Stoppard’s stubbornness that would create a little ruffle with friends like Harold Pinter before things are smoothed out again. A strong theme that ran through the book was how Tom Stoppard is not prepared to sacrifice the freedom to speak, this was something that was important to him.
Some of this biography’s chapters are headed with a play by Tom Stoppard, these would cover that play’s creative process, his involvement at theatre rehearsals, and the play’s production including publishing it. Also, imagine my relief when I read how Tom Stoppard plays are a challenge to understand – remembering my early struggles to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. It was also a surprise to discover his involvement with the movies and Hollywood as a script doctor. I would not have guessed the input he had in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Schindler’s List, and I was left with the impression that Stephen Spielberg had a hotline to him and called him when he wanted a script consultant on his movies.
I wanted to read this book because I’m interested about writers and their works. This, to my surprise, covers different forms of writing, not just theatre, as Tom Stoppard is an eclectic writer and also writes articles and fiction.
Some things that Hermione Lee shares are Tom Stoppard’s regret of missing a near chance of meeting Earnest Hemmingway (whom he was a big fan of); his collection of first editions; his lifestyle where he always kept his feet on the ground; the amount of research he did for every play; his interest in the usage of language; and influences to his writing which included his close friend Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
As I approached the ending, what was becoming apparent is the work that has gone into to composing this frank, honest and sensitive portrait. I thought Hermione Lee does this with objectivity and concludes how this was not easy when the writer is still living. I think she’s being modest, Tom Stoppard’s life is really, really complex but (somehow) Hermione Lee tells it in a coherent way that is easy to follow. I’m thinking in different hands I would not be walking away with such a clear picture of who Tom Stoppard is, where throughout his warmth and human spirit shines through.
When I first saw the length of this book at just under 1000 pages, I hesitated to borrow it from Libby via the library services. I was also unsure I could read it as it was only available as an epub, fortunately, and to my amazement, I got my old Kobo device working. When I finished reading, the book length was hard to believe as it was effortless. I was glad I found a way to read this – the combination of Tom Stoppard’s life and Hermione Lee’s writing made this an enjoyable read for me.
September 8, 2021
I was actually a bit disappointed by this biography. I like Hermione Lee’s work and think her biography of Virginia Woolf is outstanding. This one about Tom Stoppard has, I think, two flaws. There is far too much time devoted to relating what each of his plays, whether for the theatre, radio or even film, are all about. I’ve seen many of his plays and very much enjoyed them but yet one lengthy expose after another puts you, strangely, rather off them. The other issue is that Hermione Lee heaps far too much praise on Tom Stoppard’s shoulders, so I suppose he has been looking too much over her shoulder. I ended up thinking: this is all very interesting but who is the real Tom Stoppard?
November 10, 2022
Indeed...!
May 10, 2022
Ahh, what a treat. Hermione Lee is one of the best biographers working, and here she's writing about one of the best playwrights. What a life he had! The chapters about his childhood escape during the war and then his almost Dickensian story from journalist to famous writer, and then his late-life discovery of his Jewish heritage. "David Copperfield" meets "Daniel Deronda" (a scene I can imagine Stoppard writing). How does Lee do it? She weaves together life and art and tells this story with intelligence, compassion, and clarity. Buy two of these. One for yourself and one for someone else. It's such a great gift for anyone who loves literature--or theater.
October 2, 2021
I liked it, which sounds as though I am damning it with faint praise. Not at all. But it might have been better had Ms. Lee not been so obviously close to her subject and his two living wives. In the case of Miriam Stoppard, the impression given is that the marriage drifted apart almost as a sin of omission. They simply allowed it to lapse. This doesn't square with the actual narrative in the book. Stoppard is, by all accounts --- although one of his sons by the dead first wife has extraordinarily little to contribute --- a devoted father. Miriam made the home while balancing a fairly spectacular career as doctor, business executive and media superstar in the UK. When the first Mrs. Stoppard is unable to care for her children full-time because of developing personal problems, Miriam takes them in at a very young age and (mostly) raises them as her own, although they do spend time in both households. Stoppard assists in this, and also revels in the posh life of a Tory literary lion their combined incomes make possible: Georgian country estates, the best schools for the children, a private apartment in London where he can stay whilst either rehearsing new plays or writing, Concorde flights to New York, Hollywood excursions. After a brief few years of (relative) poverty at the start of his career, Stoppard writes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and off to the races he goes. Both Stoppards work hard, both seem to enjoy themselves enormously. And then he meets Felicity Kendal and after awhile, the marriage is over. Kendal has children of her own, and maintains a separate domicile, but it's messy. It is even messier when Stoppard's romance with Kendal drifts to a close and he begins a new relationship with Sinead Cusack, i.e. Mrs. Jeremy Irons and the mother of his children. Irons is a serial philanderer himself, if I correctly read the inferences from Ms. Lee's circumspect account of Cusack/Stoppard. Neither Jeremy or Sinead wants the Irons marriage to end. Tom is (inevitably) kind to their children. Meanwhile, he continues to write some spectacular screenplays (Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love) and some that are less so.
And Stoppard writes plays. I direct theatre for a living, and if Stoppard had only contributed Rosencrantz and Arcadia to the western canon, I'd be lighting candles in front of a his icon. But to have also given us The Invention of Love, The Real Thing, Indian Ink, Hapgood, Leopoldstadt, The Coast of Utopia trilogy, Rock 'n' Roll, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, The Hard Problem . . . ? These are challenging, brilliant plays that range across a diversity of themes. That Stoppard is our greatest living writer in English-language theatre remains undeniable (well, you can deny it, but you'll be wrong) in much the same way that Stephen Sondheim occupies a similar throne for musicals.
Ms. Lee provides interesting, enjoyable analyses of Stoppard's plays.
She also uncovers the Czech Jewish background. "Stoppard" is the surname of his anti-Semitic English stepfather, who married his Czech Jewish mother shortly after World War II. His father, Dr. Eugen Straussler, and mother, Marta Straussler nee Beckova, fled Europe with young Tomas and his brother before the Nazis. The father, a doctor, died in Singapore before the Japanese invasion. His wife and boys had already pushed on to Darjeeling, where Marta met Dennis, and from thence to Britain. His stepfather and mother never spoke of the boys' Jewish heritage, and Tom grew up with no connection to his ancestral religion or Czech culture. Meanwhile, the Straussler/Beckova relatives trapped in Europe were either killed by the Nazis or dispersed to places like South America.
Stoppard is fiercely, unapologetically British. Even more specific: English. He was always aware of the values represented by the democratic west that took him in as a refugee (most clearly in Rock 'n' Roll, where the playwright imagines his possible life in Czechoslovakia had he been repatriated after the war). Vaclav Havel and he developed a relationship only after Stoppard had begun to criticize Soviet totalitarianism, the horse following the cart, so to speak. Havel's plight behind the Iron Curtain caused Stoppard intense soul-searching. Ms. Lee suggests that much of this comes from Stoppard's guilt at his comfortable lifestyle and British freedoms compared to artists working in 1970s and 80s Eastern Europe and the USSR. The development of this cultural self-awareness is expertly handled by Lee, although it occasionally is obscured by the details of rehearsals, radio plays and the furniture in his homes.
The main problem with Tom Stoppard: A Life is simple: Stoppard himself is still alive and was interviewed and consulted in regard to the book. Ms. Lee is terrific about his public literary life, but is oddly reticent when it comes to discussions of his private. Miriam Stoppard was also interviewed, as were the adult children, family friends and some of the women in his life. Felicity Kendal was tightlipped about everything personal, and Cusack not much better. The net result is a picture that feels curiously edited to avoid bad feelings. Who knows? Perhaps there were none. Although I doubt it. Ms. Lee is adamant that this is not an "authorized" biography, but it frequently reads like one.
She is an excellent writer, and despite the heft of a doorstop, the book flows. As an enormous fan of his work, I am grateful Tom Stoppard: A Life exists at all, and I do highly recommend it to those familiar with Stoppard's career. And I cannot wait to direct Leopoldstadt.
And Stoppard writes plays. I direct theatre for a living, and if Stoppard had only contributed Rosencrantz and Arcadia to the western canon, I'd be lighting candles in front of a his icon. But to have also given us The Invention of Love, The Real Thing, Indian Ink, Hapgood, Leopoldstadt, The Coast of Utopia trilogy, Rock 'n' Roll, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, The Hard Problem . . . ? These are challenging, brilliant plays that range across a diversity of themes. That Stoppard is our greatest living writer in English-language theatre remains undeniable (well, you can deny it, but you'll be wrong) in much the same way that Stephen Sondheim occupies a similar throne for musicals.
Ms. Lee provides interesting, enjoyable analyses of Stoppard's plays.
She also uncovers the Czech Jewish background. "Stoppard" is the surname of his anti-Semitic English stepfather, who married his Czech Jewish mother shortly after World War II. His father, Dr. Eugen Straussler, and mother, Marta Straussler nee Beckova, fled Europe with young Tomas and his brother before the Nazis. The father, a doctor, died in Singapore before the Japanese invasion. His wife and boys had already pushed on to Darjeeling, where Marta met Dennis, and from thence to Britain. His stepfather and mother never spoke of the boys' Jewish heritage, and Tom grew up with no connection to his ancestral religion or Czech culture. Meanwhile, the Straussler/Beckova relatives trapped in Europe were either killed by the Nazis or dispersed to places like South America.
Stoppard is fiercely, unapologetically British. Even more specific: English. He was always aware of the values represented by the democratic west that took him in as a refugee (most clearly in Rock 'n' Roll, where the playwright imagines his possible life in Czechoslovakia had he been repatriated after the war). Vaclav Havel and he developed a relationship only after Stoppard had begun to criticize Soviet totalitarianism, the horse following the cart, so to speak. Havel's plight behind the Iron Curtain caused Stoppard intense soul-searching. Ms. Lee suggests that much of this comes from Stoppard's guilt at his comfortable lifestyle and British freedoms compared to artists working in 1970s and 80s Eastern Europe and the USSR. The development of this cultural self-awareness is expertly handled by Lee, although it occasionally is obscured by the details of rehearsals, radio plays and the furniture in his homes.
The main problem with Tom Stoppard: A Life is simple: Stoppard himself is still alive and was interviewed and consulted in regard to the book. Ms. Lee is terrific about his public literary life, but is oddly reticent when it comes to discussions of his private. Miriam Stoppard was also interviewed, as were the adult children, family friends and some of the women in his life. Felicity Kendal was tightlipped about everything personal, and Cusack not much better. The net result is a picture that feels curiously edited to avoid bad feelings. Who knows? Perhaps there were none. Although I doubt it. Ms. Lee is adamant that this is not an "authorized" biography, but it frequently reads like one.
She is an excellent writer, and despite the heft of a doorstop, the book flows. As an enormous fan of his work, I am grateful Tom Stoppard: A Life exists at all, and I do highly recommend it to those familiar with Stoppard's career. And I cannot wait to direct Leopoldstadt.
March 17, 2023
Brilliant and comprehensive biography of a legendary playwright. Lee gives a real sense of Tom Stoppard including his late discovery of his Jewish roots and understanding of his privilege growing up in England. There is great detail of the plays (some of which I skimmed as I’m not familiar with them all), humorous anecdotes & a sense of a vital, hardworking, witty & generous man who wears his status lightly.
September 12, 2021
I generally don't read biographies, even of artists I admire. I find myself more interested in the works themselves, and in a short lifetime, would rather read more creative works than gossipy accounts and lists of awards. I made an exception for the pairing of Lee and Stoppard. If I could exchange my career for any other, Stoppard's would be in high consideration. Success at a relatively early age for a witty and influential play. An artistic life full of collaboration with extraordinary artists. A pleasant estate just outside of London with a grand study for composition and a lawn for lavish parties. I could enjoy that life. I wish more for more productions of his plays in Arizona, or the means to travel to see them elsewhere. My impoverished life has meant seeing only three real-life productions of his work: Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead, Arcadia, and The Real Inspector Hound. The two automobiles in my garage, however, have been christened Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and they regularly provide me with moments of sublime absurdity. They were sent for, but like all of us, they remember not why.
January 7, 2021
865 pages later, I feel quite proud of myself for having slogged through to the end of this book. I should make two confessions: I am not a great fan of biography as a genre or of Stoppard's work. But Leopoldstadt was the last play I saw before the first lockdown and I admired it greatly. And I listened to the Radio 4 adaptation of this book which seemed dry and dull so was curious to see what had been left out. (Undertaking that adaptation must have been quite a challenge.)
Lee has certainly researched her subject thoroughly, almost as well as Stoppard clearly researched before writing his plays. I was interested to learn about all the reading he did but it was far too detailed and I really didn't want to read great chunks of the books that had influenced him. There must be many academic treatises written about his work and I felt that this book fell between two stools: neither a convincing intellectual biography nor an interesting account of a playwright's life. I was left with the sense that maybe his life - while busy and full of important people - wasn't that interesting. Or maybe writing a biography of a living subject is very difficult. The conclusion of the book in which Lee reflects briefly on the experience was a bit too hagiographical, as were many of the accounts of his kindness and generosity throughout the book.
I was fascinated to learn about the continuous changes he made to his texts - it would seem that there can be no definitive text to a Stoppard play. But I found the lengthy accounts of the content of each of his plays - and other writings - turgid. A lighter touch would have made me want to read them: this didn't. Some of the background to the productions of his work was interesting but, again, the detail was overwhelming.
I was very impressed by the amount of work he invested in film projects, some of which came to nothing and much of which seemed to end up uncredited. His tremendous energy - both intellectual and physical - is also impressive.
But I do think that a good editor could have pruned much of the unnecessary detail and tightened some of the writing which is sometimes trite. For example (p547) "Although he is famously a playwright of ideas.....there are always people mixed up with the ideas". Really? It would be very difficult to write a play without people, wouldn't it?
I'm sure this book will be greatly admired and future Stoppard scholars will find it an indispensable resource.
Lee has certainly researched her subject thoroughly, almost as well as Stoppard clearly researched before writing his plays. I was interested to learn about all the reading he did but it was far too detailed and I really didn't want to read great chunks of the books that had influenced him. There must be many academic treatises written about his work and I felt that this book fell between two stools: neither a convincing intellectual biography nor an interesting account of a playwright's life. I was left with the sense that maybe his life - while busy and full of important people - wasn't that interesting. Or maybe writing a biography of a living subject is very difficult. The conclusion of the book in which Lee reflects briefly on the experience was a bit too hagiographical, as were many of the accounts of his kindness and generosity throughout the book.
I was fascinated to learn about the continuous changes he made to his texts - it would seem that there can be no definitive text to a Stoppard play. But I found the lengthy accounts of the content of each of his plays - and other writings - turgid. A lighter touch would have made me want to read them: this didn't. Some of the background to the productions of his work was interesting but, again, the detail was overwhelming.
I was very impressed by the amount of work he invested in film projects, some of which came to nothing and much of which seemed to end up uncredited. His tremendous energy - both intellectual and physical - is also impressive.
But I do think that a good editor could have pruned much of the unnecessary detail and tightened some of the writing which is sometimes trite. For example (p547) "Although he is famously a playwright of ideas.....there are always people mixed up with the ideas". Really? It would be very difficult to write a play without people, wouldn't it?
I'm sure this book will be greatly admired and future Stoppard scholars will find it an indispensable resource.
August 24, 2021
Good Biography
It is very good biography and I learned a lot of Tom Stoppard. My only complaint is that I don’t feel I know him. One person who knew him say they never knew him either. He might be an enigma.
It is very good biography and I learned a lot of Tom Stoppard. My only complaint is that I don’t feel I know him. One person who knew him say they never knew him either. He might be an enigma.
November 30, 2021
The Tom Stoppard biography published in 2020 by renowned literary academic and biographer Hermione Lee is an accomplished and dramatic study of his life and works.
Stoppard commissioned the book, and provided extensive details of his life and career to assist the work. The result is less an authorised hagiography and very much more the definitive account of a life of substantial achievement as a leading playwright and screenwriter, with a revelatory twist.
Stoppard's life was transformed, and given greater meaning and distinction, in his mid fifties by major disclosures, most particularly of his Jewish ancestry, and, shockingly, of the many family relations who, unbeknown to him, were victims of the Holocaust (both sets of grandparents, and several aunts and uncles, were gassed in German concentration camps).
The revelations are astounding in that, not only did they give him a greater sense of his fundamental self, but also they suggest in retrospect that the major themes and preoccupations of Stoppard's early works derive from an almost subconscious comprehension of his place in the world, his innate sense of natural justice, his instinctive appreciation of the random nature of life, and a steadfast appreciation of the logical absurdities and inanities of left wing political philosophies.
Stoppard's adherence to these themes is the more remarkable because he was living in times when left wing politics were then (as now) fashionable in cultural circles. Much as Stoppard wanted to fit in as a seemingly native Englishman, he remained profoundly indifferent to the fashionable cultural politics of the second half of the twentieth century.
This in turn induced a negative reaction from the usual 'useful idiots' of Western cultural life. As Stoppard's plays gradually revealed an aristocratically benign and amused contempt for left wing politics and culture, he and his works were increasingly reviled by many in the theatre world, to the extent that the Royal Court Theatre in London proudly proclaimed that it would never stage his plays, and that it stood for things that were unStoppardian.
Yet Stoppard became increasingly famous and feted. His works were so successful and popular that Stoppardian entered the lexicon in the late 1970s to signify the use of intelligent and elegant wit to address major philosophical and cultural issues in theatre.
His works from the late '60s to the end of the century developed twin interests in being and politics. His first major success was in 1967, when his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead played entertainingly with Beckettian absurdity and the indifference of the universe, as the two courtiers from Hamlet find themselves randomly interacting with a repeatedly confusing revolving door entrance and exit of a Hamlet production. The play struck a chord, and has remained immensely popular, especially with young people, who love its iconoclasm and strong hints that we live in a meaningless universe.
Things developed quickly from there. Jumpers took an acrobatically circus view of academic philosophers, Travesties toyed with Marxism and Dadaism, framing their mutual inanity with a highly entertaining parody of Wilde's The Importance of being Ernest.
Politics became the centre of attention in the late '70s, as Stoppard dealt viscerally with the foul repression and political lies of communism. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was set in a Russian mental hospital, where political dissidents were treated as insane (and an insane man imagines he can corral and command an orchestra).
The television play Professional Foul mixed sport and politics in communist Czechoslovkia as a visiting liberal Western academic finds himself uncomfortably, and shamefully, confronted by the repressive realities of totalitarian life. Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth dealt with linguistic artifice and the jackboot realities of attempting to perform genuine theatre in a communist dictatorship, while Night and Day presented a witty undermining of the conventional union politics of a Fleet Street reporter filing from an African nation where a dictator is repressing revolution.
A stronger and more emotive search for meaning emerged in the '80s and '90s as The Real Thing dissected love, marriage, affairs, and divorce against a backdrop of left wing activism, followed by the magnificent Arcadia, in which themes of the meaning and value of love, status, probability theory, quantum physics, and time itself played out against a backdrop of linked lives in an English estate house in the 18th and 20th centuries. Arcadia developed the now trademark Stoppardian wit to probably its most refined and entertaining level.
The Invention of Love, and the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love rounded out the '90s, with the former notable for its examination of platonic ideals of homosexual love in the life of the Victorian and Edwardian poet and classicist A. E. Housman. (In parallel with these developments, Stoppard had an ongoing interest in the basics of reality. His 1988 play Hapgood mixed conventional spy antics with quantum mechanics, and The Hard Problem in 2015 dealt with consciousness and artificial intelligence.)
It was during the initial London run of Arcadia in 1993 that Stoppard learnt from a Czech cousin the truth of his Jewish heritage and the appalling fates of members of his extended family. He was, according to Lee's biography, profoundly affected by the revelations. He had known that his immediate family fled Czechoslovakia under the Nazis in 1939, when he was a 2 year old infant, and fled again in 1942 from the Japanese advance on Singapore (where his father was killed), and had settled in England in 1948 after six years in India, where his mother met and married his English stepfather (whose name he adopted).
Stoppard knew that his deceased father was Jewish, but his mother had held back other family details as they made a new life for themselves in England. Stoppard had a good public school education, and to all outwards purposes seemed to be a stereotypical Englishman. Yet now he learnt his Mother also was Jewish, that his ethnicity was fully Jewish, and many of his extended family had been exterminated by the Nazis.
From hereon, Stoppard's plays became more overtly political. Since the '70s, he had supported and assisted people repressed in Eastern Europe, including a long lived association with Czech dissident (and post communism President) Vaclav Havel. Now, the plays dealt more directly with the ideologies that underpinned the repressive regimes.
The Coast of Utopia opened in 2002, presenting a trilogy of plays examining the political philosophies of dissidents in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 2006, Rock and Roll used rock's liberating Dionysian appeal as a force for freedom in communist Eastern Europe, contrasting repressive experiences in Czechoslovakia with the naïvety of a British academic Marxist who continues to believe in Soviet communism, while a subplot dealing with love introduces more emotive human nuances into the usually brittle world of political activism.
The climax of Stoppard's interests in philosophy, language, the nature of reality, the impact of totalitarianism, the progress of time, and his Jewish heritage came in 2020, with the opening of what may be his last play (he is in his early 80s).
Leopoldstadt tracks the progress of an extended successful middle class Jewish family living in Vienna from the turn of the 20th century until most of them are systematically wiped out by the Nazis. The play ends with a roll-call in the 1950s of the fate of family members, with Auschwitz emerging as the dominant termination. Reviews suggest the play retains Stoppard's trademark wit, the fascination with philosophy and time, and an autumnal sense of fragile reality as characters play cats cradle, slowly realising that their professional, social, and intellectual standing is not going to protect them from a brutal and savage eradication.
Lee's biography reveals a life that seemed at first temperamentally English and reserved, with Stoppard exhibiting substantial talent and a strong and determined sense of self that easily resisted the political fashions of the times. He sought to succeed by examining the true nature of reality, philosophy, language and politics in a style of playwriting which almost seemed to have invented, rather than resuscitated, genuine theatrical flair, wit, and elegance.
Mid-life plays delivered intelligently visceral reproofs of the post-war totalitarianism that so disfigured Eastern Europe under the communists. After the revelations of the truth of Stoppard's origins, his plays in hindsight seem to be an almost innate and native reaction both to the barbaric Nazi horrors inflicted on his native Czechoslovakia, and the communist totalitarian repression that followed them until the collapse in 1989.
The story of Stoppard's life and plays unfolds like a mystery thriller, as the subject gradually discovers concealed details about his origins, and themes and inquiries in his earlier plays about political repression and totalitarianism seem doubly significant and eerily instinctive, until he produces in his early 80s a deeply moving play that reflects clearly and somberly on his origins and the political realities that oppress and destroy.
Some in the past have dismissed Stoppard's collected works as glittering but superficial, but we see now from Lee's magisterial biography that the plays were concerned with the major social and political circumstances of his time in the second half of the twentieth century, and beyond. They remain doubly relevant and meaningful in our own time, when the inanities of Marxist political fashions have had a vigorous resurgence.
Most importantly, Lee's biography reveals Tom Stoppard to be a major intellectual force who not only revitalized theatre, but used it to focus on the major philosophical and political issues of our times, and did so with an immense theatrical flair that captivated audiences and focused their minds on the depredations of political disorder, and the importance of inquiring, thinking, and making a difference (as he has said 'otherwise, what are we here for?').
Stoppard commissioned the book, and provided extensive details of his life and career to assist the work. The result is less an authorised hagiography and very much more the definitive account of a life of substantial achievement as a leading playwright and screenwriter, with a revelatory twist.
Stoppard's life was transformed, and given greater meaning and distinction, in his mid fifties by major disclosures, most particularly of his Jewish ancestry, and, shockingly, of the many family relations who, unbeknown to him, were victims of the Holocaust (both sets of grandparents, and several aunts and uncles, were gassed in German concentration camps).
The revelations are astounding in that, not only did they give him a greater sense of his fundamental self, but also they suggest in retrospect that the major themes and preoccupations of Stoppard's early works derive from an almost subconscious comprehension of his place in the world, his innate sense of natural justice, his instinctive appreciation of the random nature of life, and a steadfast appreciation of the logical absurdities and inanities of left wing political philosophies.
Stoppard's adherence to these themes is the more remarkable because he was living in times when left wing politics were then (as now) fashionable in cultural circles. Much as Stoppard wanted to fit in as a seemingly native Englishman, he remained profoundly indifferent to the fashionable cultural politics of the second half of the twentieth century.
This in turn induced a negative reaction from the usual 'useful idiots' of Western cultural life. As Stoppard's plays gradually revealed an aristocratically benign and amused contempt for left wing politics and culture, he and his works were increasingly reviled by many in the theatre world, to the extent that the Royal Court Theatre in London proudly proclaimed that it would never stage his plays, and that it stood for things that were unStoppardian.
Yet Stoppard became increasingly famous and feted. His works were so successful and popular that Stoppardian entered the lexicon in the late 1970s to signify the use of intelligent and elegant wit to address major philosophical and cultural issues in theatre.
His works from the late '60s to the end of the century developed twin interests in being and politics. His first major success was in 1967, when his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead played entertainingly with Beckettian absurdity and the indifference of the universe, as the two courtiers from Hamlet find themselves randomly interacting with a repeatedly confusing revolving door entrance and exit of a Hamlet production. The play struck a chord, and has remained immensely popular, especially with young people, who love its iconoclasm and strong hints that we live in a meaningless universe.
Things developed quickly from there. Jumpers took an acrobatically circus view of academic philosophers, Travesties toyed with Marxism and Dadaism, framing their mutual inanity with a highly entertaining parody of Wilde's The Importance of being Ernest.
Politics became the centre of attention in the late '70s, as Stoppard dealt viscerally with the foul repression and political lies of communism. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was set in a Russian mental hospital, where political dissidents were treated as insane (and an insane man imagines he can corral and command an orchestra).
The television play Professional Foul mixed sport and politics in communist Czechoslovkia as a visiting liberal Western academic finds himself uncomfortably, and shamefully, confronted by the repressive realities of totalitarian life. Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth dealt with linguistic artifice and the jackboot realities of attempting to perform genuine theatre in a communist dictatorship, while Night and Day presented a witty undermining of the conventional union politics of a Fleet Street reporter filing from an African nation where a dictator is repressing revolution.
A stronger and more emotive search for meaning emerged in the '80s and '90s as The Real Thing dissected love, marriage, affairs, and divorce against a backdrop of left wing activism, followed by the magnificent Arcadia, in which themes of the meaning and value of love, status, probability theory, quantum physics, and time itself played out against a backdrop of linked lives in an English estate house in the 18th and 20th centuries. Arcadia developed the now trademark Stoppardian wit to probably its most refined and entertaining level.
The Invention of Love, and the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love rounded out the '90s, with the former notable for its examination of platonic ideals of homosexual love in the life of the Victorian and Edwardian poet and classicist A. E. Housman. (In parallel with these developments, Stoppard had an ongoing interest in the basics of reality. His 1988 play Hapgood mixed conventional spy antics with quantum mechanics, and The Hard Problem in 2015 dealt with consciousness and artificial intelligence.)
It was during the initial London run of Arcadia in 1993 that Stoppard learnt from a Czech cousin the truth of his Jewish heritage and the appalling fates of members of his extended family. He was, according to Lee's biography, profoundly affected by the revelations. He had known that his immediate family fled Czechoslovakia under the Nazis in 1939, when he was a 2 year old infant, and fled again in 1942 from the Japanese advance on Singapore (where his father was killed), and had settled in England in 1948 after six years in India, where his mother met and married his English stepfather (whose name he adopted).
Stoppard knew that his deceased father was Jewish, but his mother had held back other family details as they made a new life for themselves in England. Stoppard had a good public school education, and to all outwards purposes seemed to be a stereotypical Englishman. Yet now he learnt his Mother also was Jewish, that his ethnicity was fully Jewish, and many of his extended family had been exterminated by the Nazis.
From hereon, Stoppard's plays became more overtly political. Since the '70s, he had supported and assisted people repressed in Eastern Europe, including a long lived association with Czech dissident (and post communism President) Vaclav Havel. Now, the plays dealt more directly with the ideologies that underpinned the repressive regimes.
The Coast of Utopia opened in 2002, presenting a trilogy of plays examining the political philosophies of dissidents in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 2006, Rock and Roll used rock's liberating Dionysian appeal as a force for freedom in communist Eastern Europe, contrasting repressive experiences in Czechoslovakia with the naïvety of a British academic Marxist who continues to believe in Soviet communism, while a subplot dealing with love introduces more emotive human nuances into the usually brittle world of political activism.
The climax of Stoppard's interests in philosophy, language, the nature of reality, the impact of totalitarianism, the progress of time, and his Jewish heritage came in 2020, with the opening of what may be his last play (he is in his early 80s).
Leopoldstadt tracks the progress of an extended successful middle class Jewish family living in Vienna from the turn of the 20th century until most of them are systematically wiped out by the Nazis. The play ends with a roll-call in the 1950s of the fate of family members, with Auschwitz emerging as the dominant termination. Reviews suggest the play retains Stoppard's trademark wit, the fascination with philosophy and time, and an autumnal sense of fragile reality as characters play cats cradle, slowly realising that their professional, social, and intellectual standing is not going to protect them from a brutal and savage eradication.
Lee's biography reveals a life that seemed at first temperamentally English and reserved, with Stoppard exhibiting substantial talent and a strong and determined sense of self that easily resisted the political fashions of the times. He sought to succeed by examining the true nature of reality, philosophy, language and politics in a style of playwriting which almost seemed to have invented, rather than resuscitated, genuine theatrical flair, wit, and elegance.
Mid-life plays delivered intelligently visceral reproofs of the post-war totalitarianism that so disfigured Eastern Europe under the communists. After the revelations of the truth of Stoppard's origins, his plays in hindsight seem to be an almost innate and native reaction both to the barbaric Nazi horrors inflicted on his native Czechoslovakia, and the communist totalitarian repression that followed them until the collapse in 1989.
The story of Stoppard's life and plays unfolds like a mystery thriller, as the subject gradually discovers concealed details about his origins, and themes and inquiries in his earlier plays about political repression and totalitarianism seem doubly significant and eerily instinctive, until he produces in his early 80s a deeply moving play that reflects clearly and somberly on his origins and the political realities that oppress and destroy.
Some in the past have dismissed Stoppard's collected works as glittering but superficial, but we see now from Lee's magisterial biography that the plays were concerned with the major social and political circumstances of his time in the second half of the twentieth century, and beyond. They remain doubly relevant and meaningful in our own time, when the inanities of Marxist political fashions have had a vigorous resurgence.
Most importantly, Lee's biography reveals Tom Stoppard to be a major intellectual force who not only revitalized theatre, but used it to focus on the major philosophical and political issues of our times, and did so with an immense theatrical flair that captivated audiences and focused their minds on the depredations of political disorder, and the importance of inquiring, thinking, and making a difference (as he has said 'otherwise, what are we here for?').
January 1, 2021
Wow. That was a huge read, and a slog to finish before 2021. But so much information. I now want to reread every play. I confess that coming up to halfway through, I started wondering when Felicity Kendal would come into the picture... I learned a lot about his working practices, and his inspirations. Fortunately, I also learned that the playwright whose work I have adored since Dogg's Hamlet, all those decades ago, is a very nice person indeed. Hermione Lee has done a very good and thorough job.
Read
August 6, 2021Stoppard is a wonderful playwright. He’s also led a juicy life. This book, however, is strangely both dry and non-intellectual. The details are all here. If details are what you want, you’ll find whatever you’re looking for in this biography. Maybe this is the modern British style of biography, a just the facts ma’am approach?
November 13, 2021
I think that Tom Stoppard is the greatest living English language playwright, so I jumped at the chance to read this lengthy, exhaustive biography. Closely researched and written quite well, I learned a good bit about a playwright I thought I knew a lot about (a former actor, and after a professor of theatre history for more than 20 years). Not all of what I learned was to my liking (he admired Margaret THATCHER!?! ugh), but his discovery fairly late in life of his Jewish roots, his friendship with Vaclav Havel (a hero of mine), his work in support of PEN, his championing of groups such as the Belarus Free Theatre and much more I found admirable.
So, a mixed to good review on his life, and I fear a mixed review on his biographer. Can a biography ever be too detailed? If so then Hermione Lee might fall into that category in this case. When I wrote the word "exhaustive" above I might well have written "exhausting." I found it compelling in places, particularly when she wrote about works of his I most admire - R&G are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, Arcadia and Shakespeare in Love (who doesn't like the last two? Some, I'm sure but then ,to play on a clever phrase, "for those who don't like that sort of thing...that is the sort of thing they don't like." But I found her thoughts and information on some of the other works somewhat tedious.
And after a while I found her possibly guilty of name-dropping, though God knows Stoppard knew lots and lots of important people.
All that said, I was really moved by the last few chapters (I retired in 2012 and have since paid little attention to the contemporary theatre scene), particularly on his most recent play, Leopoldstadt. Long life to him! And to her as well. Cheers all!
So, a mixed to good review on his life, and I fear a mixed review on his biographer. Can a biography ever be too detailed? If so then Hermione Lee might fall into that category in this case. When I wrote the word "exhaustive" above I might well have written "exhausting." I found it compelling in places, particularly when she wrote about works of his I most admire - R&G are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, Arcadia and Shakespeare in Love (who doesn't like the last two? Some, I'm sure but then ,to play on a clever phrase, "for those who don't like that sort of thing...that is the sort of thing they don't like." But I found her thoughts and information on some of the other works somewhat tedious.
And after a while I found her possibly guilty of name-dropping, though God knows Stoppard knew lots and lots of important people.
All that said, I was really moved by the last few chapters (I retired in 2012 and have since paid little attention to the contemporary theatre scene), particularly on his most recent play, Leopoldstadt. Long life to him! And to her as well. Cheers all!
November 18, 2023
As usual, he is doing a delicate balancing act. He wants to please and satisfy the whole audience, but he also wants one person - or possibly ten people - to relish and understand everything, and he is writing for those people, while keeping everybody else happy.
#######
What would being 'Jewish' mean? For him it had to do with a strong sense of family, and the valuing of intellectual life.
#######
He could only explain what he meant by reading that much-cherished, deeply melancholy passage from James Saunders's Next Time I'll Sing to You
'There lies behind everything ... a certain quality which we may call grief. It's always there below the surface, just behind the facade. Sometimes ... you can see dimly the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental lake the outline of a carp ... It bides its time, this quality ... you may pretend not to notice ... the name of this quality is grief.'
#######
What would being 'Jewish' mean? For him it had to do with a strong sense of family, and the valuing of intellectual life.
#######
He could only explain what he meant by reading that much-cherished, deeply melancholy passage from James Saunders's Next Time I'll Sing to You
'There lies behind everything ... a certain quality which we may call grief. It's always there below the surface, just behind the facade. Sometimes ... you can see dimly the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental lake the outline of a carp ... It bides its time, this quality ... you may pretend not to notice ... the name of this quality is grief.'
July 30, 2023
What more can be said? This is a deeply moving biography of an astonishing playwright written by a brilliant biographer--an amazing reading experience where, for the final third of the book, I battled a swelling sob rising in me. Going forward, I will be reading for the first time, and revisiting for others, as many of Stoppard's plays as I can collect.
Read
March 3, 2023yes!
May 27, 2021
I listened to the audiobook of this -- 38 hours! -- and recommend listening as a way to make it through this book. It took me two months of pandemic walks to finish, and I found the book a very genial companion for that purpose. The book is so highly detailed -- you will learn what the nanny made for breakfast and which speech Stoppard gave resulted in a speeding ticket afterwards -- that I never felt compelled (as I often do with audiobooks) to skip backwards to make sure I caught all the details. I just let this book wash over me and pushed forward. That said, I do think the last hour or so -- thus the last 5% or so of the book -- is a great summation of Stoppard's career, a gentle and worthy assessment of his contribution and his importance. For those who don't know much about Stoppard but are intrigued enough to give this a try, I would even suggest reading this last section first to orient yourself before diving into all the details of 60+ years of daily life. I'm old enough to have seen a few Stoppard first run productions (in the US) but also philistine enough that to me, first and foremost, he's the co-author of "Shakespeare in Love" (which I consider a witty delight for Shakespeare lovers). Nevertheless, I enjoyed hearing about Stoppard's whole career, though I would say that the last third or so, when Stoppard is already "the world's most famous English-language playwright" and is mostly just building on his already-created stardom, gets a little tedious with name-dropping and continent-hopping and revival-producing. The first 2/3rds however, when Stoppard is establishing himself and growing creatively, is well worth the read. Stoppard is hard-working and productive, so in those early years he's always got something interesting cooking.
July 1, 2023
This book is a phenomenon.
It seems, at times, less like a biography, and more like an encyclopedia. It will surely be used as a vast resource of information for people who are studying or performing or directing Stoppard’s plays. Or who just want some context to a play. (Early in the book, I was disconcerted by the level of detail – “the day started early, with a six-thirty breakfast, and religious assembly taken by the chaplain. The younger boys had a break in the morning, with milk, and the rest upstairs in the dormitories after lunch. They wore a blue school uniform with a striped tie.” However, while that particular detail seemed – and still seems – inconsequential, by the end of the book I was grateful that so much had been included. At times, I felt no need for the information, but in the sense of the book being an encyclopaedic resource, I was happy to have it for later reference.)
There is a certain benevolence to the work, evident in the fact that Lee has either interviewed, or received reflections from, Stoppard’s children and others who had varying levels of closeness to him, and none of these imply anything uncomfortable or sensational. Part of this may be attributable to the fact that Stoppard is still alive; that he chose Hermione Lee as his biographer and since the interviewees are all likely to encounter Stoppard post-publication, any negative comments would likely be seen as combative. Lee respected his privacy to the extent that she mentions that he noted “he ‘got upset about something’. But that ‘something’ was not anything he would tell his biographer.” This can be seen as leading to a sanitised story of his life. But personally, I am happy to read a biography that does not seek to uncover garish secrets and expose them to the world.
One of the clear conclusions from the work is that Tom Stoppard is a thoroughly likeable, good person. His New York producer, for example, “noted that he knew the name of the backstage doorman and the doorman’s wife, asked them how they were, was never rude, and had no snobbery and no narcissism in him.”
This is not to say he is perfect, but I don’t have any desire to scrutinise his diversions from perfection. In view of his scoresheet of five intimate relationships over his life, he could be viewed as a philanderer; perhaps he is. However, I am not interested in pursuing the question. All too often, I read biographies of writers and find myself dragged to windows on their lives and forced to look at things I have no interest in seeing.
In recent months I have read biographies of Patrick White and James Joyce, both writers whose lives – and whose humanity, to be frank – were severely flawed but whose writings and public utterances implicitly claim a profound insight into the human condition.
By contrast, here is Stoppard, earnest in his attempts to lead a good life and to understand the human condition, and modest.
The vital thing about Tom Stoppard, however, is the fact that he is an outstanding dramatist, and a very clever intellect. Because of that, it is fascinating to watch, in detail, his development as a mind, as a writer and as a person.
The family history and Tom’s (and his brother Peter’s) childhood are not extraordinary for 1930s central Europe but, one way and another, Tom only realised how exotic it all was much, much later, and his primary outlook for a long time was simply to be grateful to have landed in the world he did – a variety of conservatism which seems to have had a profound durability, although it has possibly started to abate in his later years. (It is fascinating that, for many years, the Royal Court Theatre apparently had a policy not to perform his work.)
Stoppard’s life almost suggests that some people do have a pre-ordained destiny awaiting them in the cosmos. Having had a successful schooling in his new country, he decided not to bother with university, but to head straight out into the world. This would be more radical and more difficult these days than it was then. However, it seems to have been a sound decision; one suspects that what he learnt in the journalism world he entered was far more valuable than what he would have encountered in a university. Good fortune provided him with a job on a newspaper in Bristol, a city which was small enough to allow him to make a mark, but wide enough to be inhabited by some interesting characters, and by an energetic theatre scene. His cleverness and skill with words, his surrealist thinking and his playful sense of farce, quickly became apparent; the pre-destiny then started to move into gear as he attended some plays, having previously had no interest in drama. He was smitten by Beckett and Shakespeare, became friends with Peter O’Toole, the first in a remarkably long line of friendships with notable people, and he evolved some personal theories and values in his drama and film reviews. He was lured by the prospect of fame and decided to take the chance of writing full-time. At the age of twenty-three!
This was an era of remarkable creativity and inventiveness in British arts, with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Sam Beckett, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, David Frost, Barry Humphries and Clive James, Morecombe and Wise, Just a Minute , the Goons. all active and interacting. Not to mention assorted rock artists, directors and actors.
I mentioned earlier that Hermione Lee’s book is comprehensive. It is ordered more or less chronologically around the writing of the plays. For each new play she examines Stoppard’s thinking that led to the work, and his subsequent reading and research (and she distils much of the thinking with great lucidity). She describes its writing, then the process by which it was taken on by a theatre company, and the contracting of production staff and actors. There is description of the early performances with some reference to audience response, and finally a look at critics’ responses. Later significant productions are also described. It has always been important to Stoppard that he have some involvement in the pre-performance development, doing some editing of his text; and he usually carried out further re-writing for later productions, so that scripts rarely remained stable, evolving from one production to the next. This approach by Lee means that Tom Stoppard. A Life offers a compendious multi-dimensional perspective of each work. And each work is shown in relation to Stoppard the man.
In view of the centrality of examination of language in Stoppard, it is not surprising that his biography offers a catalogue of his pithy and witty aphorisms.
• “ Mailer may one day be admired despite his opinions, which is the test of a writer, instead of because of them, which is the test of a propagandist.”
• Death is “the absence of presence, nothing more.”
• “When I’m talking about my own work to somebody, my relationship with them is rather like that of a duped smuggler confronted with a customs officer. I truthfully declare that I am indeed responsible for this piece about two specific individuals in a particular situation. Then he starts ransacking my luggage and comes up with all manner of exotic contraband like truth and illusion, the nature of identity, what I feel about life and death – and I have to admit the stuff is there but I can’t for the life of me remember packing it.”
• “I’m not impressed by art because it’s political, I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art.”
• “The important truths are simple and monolithic. The essentials of a given situation speak for themselves, and language is as capable of obscuring the truth as of revealing it.”
• “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
• “I’m not trying to make the plays difficult, God help me. Nobody could think that one would just be mischievous or perverse and try to make life hard for the audience.”
A quintessential feature of Tom Stoppard is his abiding sense of his family’s extraordinary good fortune in having escaped Nazi Europe, and then subsequently, having escaped Singapore just before the Japanese took it. Tom Stoppard was born Tomás Sträussler, in what is now the Czech Republic, with lapsed Jewish heritage. His father died trying to escape from the Japanese, his mother took the boys to India where they established yet another life. She met an English serviceman, Major Ken Stoppard, and they married and travelled to England where the young boys had their surname formally changed to Stoppard. Tomás, now Tom, became enamoured of all things English, especially its 1950s values. Their mother sought to smooth their new life, leaving behind all the complexities of Czechoslovakia. This was as Ken Stoppard also wanted. It happened much later that Tom pursued the details of his family background, and as he did so, his personal image and politics were both adjusted. Tom and his brother later described the step-father as a “bitter, disappointed man, bigoted, xenophobic and anti-Semitic.” Lee explains the man’s opinion “that five years in the army ought to have earned him a better life, and becoming increasingly curmudgeonly. His prejudices – against foreigners, non-whites, Jews, Irish, Yanks, homosexuals, the urban working class and ‘arty’ types – got more and more entrenched.” Yet Tom seems to have experienced remarkably little resentment or hostility.
This is even more remarkable given that shortly after Tom and Peter’s mother died in her eighties when Tom was almost sixty, Ken Stoppard told Tom, both face to face and in a letter, that he should stop using the Stoppard name. This pathetic, cruel late gesture is explained as being because of the determinedly English Ken’s resentment of his stepson’s fame and public attachment to Jewish causes and to European culture.
Tom’s innate good sense and unschooled critical acumen, independently developed in the real world and outside the academy, are apparent in an early comment on a Becket production he saw: “‘It’s so awful you have to laugh. When I saw it, hardly anyone did – they had come for punishment, as a misguided tribute to Becket. He would not thank them for it.‘”
When he started writing plays, his primary focus was on language and entertainment, not on social issues, rather putting him out of step with arts movements of the sixties. This did not mean that his plays were lightweight or superficial: far from it. As Lee explains,
In what became a lifelong habit, he grafted onto a dramatic event a hard problem in philosophy, history or science: language games, particle physics, chaos theory, consciousness, unlikely subjects for theatrical entertainment. It became one of his hallmarks.” And “the essential link between all this work was language: its use, its censorship, its distortion, its relation to truth.
Stoppard was and remained instinctively conservative, still persuaded by the values of his haven, 1950s England. And his awareness of the horrors of the land his life could have been lived in, gave him a dislike of the far left, both domestically and internationally. Then, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, which horrified Stoppard, although not so that he became a strong activist. His personal commitment began after he investigated the punishment of a group of Russians who protested about the invasion. This was followed by a visit to the USSR and secret meetings with dissidents, and by writings on totalitarianism. However, his focus then also adjusted to include Czechoslovakia, with familiar comparisons: “Václav Havel, a playwright whose mother didn’t marry into British democracy, has been charged with high treason.” Then The New York Review of Books sent him to Prague. “He learned about the weird upside-down world’ ‘where you can find boilers stoked by economists, streets swept by men reading Henry James in English… and third-rate time-servers are chauffeured around in black, bulbous, chrome-trimmed Tatra 603s straight out of a Fifties’ spy film’. And he met and engaged with Havel. “Havel seemed to him like an alter ego, the person he would have liked to have been if he hadn’t been lucky enough to be an Englishman.” Out of these encounters, and the cogitations attached to them, came Professional Foul , surely one of Stoppard’s very finest plays, with its moral and political searchings, but still with its word-play skipping about reality and logic.
Hermione Lee’s biography is a superb work. For the reader who has known of Stoppard and wants to know him, this is the vehicle to lead to him; for someone who knows the plays, and wants to know how one came to be written, and then how it travelled from there, and how it was received, or who has often wondered about a particular passage, this is the filing cabinet, and it is the magnifying glass that have been needed. The book comprises 865 pages of the biography, 2 of a chronology of the works, 5 of a bibliography, 2 of acknowledgements, 70 of notes, and 30 for the index. And 24 pages of photographs.
Lee writes, in the last chapter,
“You try to bring the person to life as fully as you can on your page, your stage of written words. But in the end, this person, Tom Stoppard, will vanish into the darkness, and all those things that made this person who he was will vanish with him. He will live on in his work: you will find him there, as he has always wanted you to. Once he vanishes, he becomes his admirers. His life turns into the work he has left behind, and into other people’s stories, legends, anecdotes and versions of him – of which this book is one. What I have tried to capture will only ever be one aspect of him. The relation of the written to the lived life can only be partial.
It is unsurprising that she is so thoughtful about her task; it is surprising that she has been so unintrusive.
This is a wonderful book.
It seems, at times, less like a biography, and more like an encyclopedia. It will surely be used as a vast resource of information for people who are studying or performing or directing Stoppard’s plays. Or who just want some context to a play. (Early in the book, I was disconcerted by the level of detail – “the day started early, with a six-thirty breakfast, and religious assembly taken by the chaplain. The younger boys had a break in the morning, with milk, and the rest upstairs in the dormitories after lunch. They wore a blue school uniform with a striped tie.” However, while that particular detail seemed – and still seems – inconsequential, by the end of the book I was grateful that so much had been included. At times, I felt no need for the information, but in the sense of the book being an encyclopaedic resource, I was happy to have it for later reference.)
There is a certain benevolence to the work, evident in the fact that Lee has either interviewed, or received reflections from, Stoppard’s children and others who had varying levels of closeness to him, and none of these imply anything uncomfortable or sensational. Part of this may be attributable to the fact that Stoppard is still alive; that he chose Hermione Lee as his biographer and since the interviewees are all likely to encounter Stoppard post-publication, any negative comments would likely be seen as combative. Lee respected his privacy to the extent that she mentions that he noted “he ‘got upset about something’. But that ‘something’ was not anything he would tell his biographer.” This can be seen as leading to a sanitised story of his life. But personally, I am happy to read a biography that does not seek to uncover garish secrets and expose them to the world.
One of the clear conclusions from the work is that Tom Stoppard is a thoroughly likeable, good person. His New York producer, for example, “noted that he knew the name of the backstage doorman and the doorman’s wife, asked them how they were, was never rude, and had no snobbery and no narcissism in him.”
This is not to say he is perfect, but I don’t have any desire to scrutinise his diversions from perfection. In view of his scoresheet of five intimate relationships over his life, he could be viewed as a philanderer; perhaps he is. However, I am not interested in pursuing the question. All too often, I read biographies of writers and find myself dragged to windows on their lives and forced to look at things I have no interest in seeing.
In recent months I have read biographies of Patrick White and James Joyce, both writers whose lives – and whose humanity, to be frank – were severely flawed but whose writings and public utterances implicitly claim a profound insight into the human condition.
By contrast, here is Stoppard, earnest in his attempts to lead a good life and to understand the human condition, and modest.
The vital thing about Tom Stoppard, however, is the fact that he is an outstanding dramatist, and a very clever intellect. Because of that, it is fascinating to watch, in detail, his development as a mind, as a writer and as a person.
The family history and Tom’s (and his brother Peter’s) childhood are not extraordinary for 1930s central Europe but, one way and another, Tom only realised how exotic it all was much, much later, and his primary outlook for a long time was simply to be grateful to have landed in the world he did – a variety of conservatism which seems to have had a profound durability, although it has possibly started to abate in his later years. (It is fascinating that, for many years, the Royal Court Theatre apparently had a policy not to perform his work.)
Stoppard’s life almost suggests that some people do have a pre-ordained destiny awaiting them in the cosmos. Having had a successful schooling in his new country, he decided not to bother with university, but to head straight out into the world. This would be more radical and more difficult these days than it was then. However, it seems to have been a sound decision; one suspects that what he learnt in the journalism world he entered was far more valuable than what he would have encountered in a university. Good fortune provided him with a job on a newspaper in Bristol, a city which was small enough to allow him to make a mark, but wide enough to be inhabited by some interesting characters, and by an energetic theatre scene. His cleverness and skill with words, his surrealist thinking and his playful sense of farce, quickly became apparent; the pre-destiny then started to move into gear as he attended some plays, having previously had no interest in drama. He was smitten by Beckett and Shakespeare, became friends with Peter O’Toole, the first in a remarkably long line of friendships with notable people, and he evolved some personal theories and values in his drama and film reviews. He was lured by the prospect of fame and decided to take the chance of writing full-time. At the age of twenty-three!
This was an era of remarkable creativity and inventiveness in British arts, with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Sam Beckett, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, David Frost, Barry Humphries and Clive James, Morecombe and Wise, Just a Minute , the Goons. all active and interacting. Not to mention assorted rock artists, directors and actors.
I mentioned earlier that Hermione Lee’s book is comprehensive. It is ordered more or less chronologically around the writing of the plays. For each new play she examines Stoppard’s thinking that led to the work, and his subsequent reading and research (and she distils much of the thinking with great lucidity). She describes its writing, then the process by which it was taken on by a theatre company, and the contracting of production staff and actors. There is description of the early performances with some reference to audience response, and finally a look at critics’ responses. Later significant productions are also described. It has always been important to Stoppard that he have some involvement in the pre-performance development, doing some editing of his text; and he usually carried out further re-writing for later productions, so that scripts rarely remained stable, evolving from one production to the next. This approach by Lee means that Tom Stoppard. A Life offers a compendious multi-dimensional perspective of each work. And each work is shown in relation to Stoppard the man.
In view of the centrality of examination of language in Stoppard, it is not surprising that his biography offers a catalogue of his pithy and witty aphorisms.
• “ Mailer may one day be admired despite his opinions, which is the test of a writer, instead of because of them, which is the test of a propagandist.”
• Death is “the absence of presence, nothing more.”
• “When I’m talking about my own work to somebody, my relationship with them is rather like that of a duped smuggler confronted with a customs officer. I truthfully declare that I am indeed responsible for this piece about two specific individuals in a particular situation. Then he starts ransacking my luggage and comes up with all manner of exotic contraband like truth and illusion, the nature of identity, what I feel about life and death – and I have to admit the stuff is there but I can’t for the life of me remember packing it.”
• “I’m not impressed by art because it’s political, I believe in art being good art or bad art, not relevant art or irrelevant art.”
• “The important truths are simple and monolithic. The essentials of a given situation speak for themselves, and language is as capable of obscuring the truth as of revealing it.”
• “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
• “I’m not trying to make the plays difficult, God help me. Nobody could think that one would just be mischievous or perverse and try to make life hard for the audience.”
A quintessential feature of Tom Stoppard is his abiding sense of his family’s extraordinary good fortune in having escaped Nazi Europe, and then subsequently, having escaped Singapore just before the Japanese took it. Tom Stoppard was born Tomás Sträussler, in what is now the Czech Republic, with lapsed Jewish heritage. His father died trying to escape from the Japanese, his mother took the boys to India where they established yet another life. She met an English serviceman, Major Ken Stoppard, and they married and travelled to England where the young boys had their surname formally changed to Stoppard. Tomás, now Tom, became enamoured of all things English, especially its 1950s values. Their mother sought to smooth their new life, leaving behind all the complexities of Czechoslovakia. This was as Ken Stoppard also wanted. It happened much later that Tom pursued the details of his family background, and as he did so, his personal image and politics were both adjusted. Tom and his brother later described the step-father as a “bitter, disappointed man, bigoted, xenophobic and anti-Semitic.” Lee explains the man’s opinion “that five years in the army ought to have earned him a better life, and becoming increasingly curmudgeonly. His prejudices – against foreigners, non-whites, Jews, Irish, Yanks, homosexuals, the urban working class and ‘arty’ types – got more and more entrenched.” Yet Tom seems to have experienced remarkably little resentment or hostility.
This is even more remarkable given that shortly after Tom and Peter’s mother died in her eighties when Tom was almost sixty, Ken Stoppard told Tom, both face to face and in a letter, that he should stop using the Stoppard name. This pathetic, cruel late gesture is explained as being because of the determinedly English Ken’s resentment of his stepson’s fame and public attachment to Jewish causes and to European culture.
Tom’s innate good sense and unschooled critical acumen, independently developed in the real world and outside the academy, are apparent in an early comment on a Becket production he saw: “‘It’s so awful you have to laugh. When I saw it, hardly anyone did – they had come for punishment, as a misguided tribute to Becket. He would not thank them for it.‘”
When he started writing plays, his primary focus was on language and entertainment, not on social issues, rather putting him out of step with arts movements of the sixties. This did not mean that his plays were lightweight or superficial: far from it. As Lee explains,
In what became a lifelong habit, he grafted onto a dramatic event a hard problem in philosophy, history or science: language games, particle physics, chaos theory, consciousness, unlikely subjects for theatrical entertainment. It became one of his hallmarks.” And “the essential link between all this work was language: its use, its censorship, its distortion, its relation to truth.
Stoppard was and remained instinctively conservative, still persuaded by the values of his haven, 1950s England. And his awareness of the horrors of the land his life could have been lived in, gave him a dislike of the far left, both domestically and internationally. Then, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, which horrified Stoppard, although not so that he became a strong activist. His personal commitment began after he investigated the punishment of a group of Russians who protested about the invasion. This was followed by a visit to the USSR and secret meetings with dissidents, and by writings on totalitarianism. However, his focus then also adjusted to include Czechoslovakia, with familiar comparisons: “Václav Havel, a playwright whose mother didn’t marry into British democracy, has been charged with high treason.” Then The New York Review of Books sent him to Prague. “He learned about the weird upside-down world’ ‘where you can find boilers stoked by economists, streets swept by men reading Henry James in English… and third-rate time-servers are chauffeured around in black, bulbous, chrome-trimmed Tatra 603s straight out of a Fifties’ spy film’. And he met and engaged with Havel. “Havel seemed to him like an alter ego, the person he would have liked to have been if he hadn’t been lucky enough to be an Englishman.” Out of these encounters, and the cogitations attached to them, came Professional Foul , surely one of Stoppard’s very finest plays, with its moral and political searchings, but still with its word-play skipping about reality and logic.
Hermione Lee’s biography is a superb work. For the reader who has known of Stoppard and wants to know him, this is the vehicle to lead to him; for someone who knows the plays, and wants to know how one came to be written, and then how it travelled from there, and how it was received, or who has often wondered about a particular passage, this is the filing cabinet, and it is the magnifying glass that have been needed. The book comprises 865 pages of the biography, 2 of a chronology of the works, 5 of a bibliography, 2 of acknowledgements, 70 of notes, and 30 for the index. And 24 pages of photographs.
Lee writes, in the last chapter,
“You try to bring the person to life as fully as you can on your page, your stage of written words. But in the end, this person, Tom Stoppard, will vanish into the darkness, and all those things that made this person who he was will vanish with him. He will live on in his work: you will find him there, as he has always wanted you to. Once he vanishes, he becomes his admirers. His life turns into the work he has left behind, and into other people’s stories, legends, anecdotes and versions of him – of which this book is one. What I have tried to capture will only ever be one aspect of him. The relation of the written to the lived life can only be partial.
It is unsurprising that she is so thoughtful about her task; it is surprising that she has been so unintrusive.
This is a wonderful book.
February 25, 2023
About ten years ago, I read "Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told," the oral history of Joseph Papp, the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival- Papp's effort to bring Shakespeare to the masses by staging plays free of charge in Central Park. Though I'd never been to the Shakespeare Festival, I absolutely loved the book. I live in Buffalo now, and Papp's idea has spread here. Every summer, two Shakespeare plays are performed in a public park and anyone can attend free of charge.
I haven't been around theater people a lot in my life, but my impression has always been that they are special. In a lot of places you can't make a living as a director, producer, or actor in plays. But everyone involved has a great love for their art and that enthusiasm is infectious. So they do it, because of that great love.
I think that it was those thoughts, and the memory of the Papp book, that motivated me to pick up Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard. I'd heard of him, of course, and had read about his many successful plays, but I'd never seen one. The only Stoppard-written production I'd seen was "Shakespeare in Love," which I enjoyed. But it was something about the magic of the theater that made me want to read the book.
Overall, the book is quite good, and very detailed. Stoppard has been a very prolific writer over his lengthy career, and the author included synopses of nearly everything he wrote. That information is helpful if you haven't seen a lot of the plays. The themes and ideas are fascinating.
I found that I really liked the early part of the book, which detailed Stoppard's childhood, schooling and his early work in journalism. Somehow Stoppard was a more interesting person before he became the great playwright. And the sections about his Czech background were well researched and interesting to read. It was a background that he placed way in the background for most of his life.
After that, the book was almost dizzying in its detail about the plays, actors, producers, agents, the honors he received, the parties he attended, the celebrities he socialized with, the women he loved, most of whom seemed to be committed to other men before Stoppard came into their lives. A lot of detail and mostly enjoyable to read.
There were a couple of things that nagged at me. One was the idea that despite all of the detail and the research that obviously went into the book, we weren't really getting to know Stoppard in depth. It was a little like the criticism sometimes leveled at his plays. They were intellectually challenging, for sure, but where was the emotion? Stoppard had a reputation for being unrevealing about his personal life, and a suspicion of biographers (though he chose this one), so it looked a bit like the book suffered from those factors.
The tone of the book is very favorable . There are likely good reasons for that, what is there to dislike about the man? Still, he wasn't perfect. Certainly a bit of a womanizer for one thing. But he is also a charming man and it seemed that the author was charmed by her subject.
The last chapter really turned it around for me. There was the a story about Stoppard reading critical comments in a book to the effect that he was one of those people, specifically a Jewish person who lived in Europe during the Holocaust, who pretended that he didn't have all of these tragedies close to him in his past. How he pretended that he was always English. To his credit, Stoppard took the criticism to heart and did some serious thinking and studying and then wrote "Leopoldstadt." In the same chapter, the author gets out from behind the screen and talks about her one-on-one contact with Stoppard. It was all very effective. I felt that I learned more about him in the last chapter than I had in all of the chapters that preceded it.
Lee is an excellent writer, and she has a fascinating subject. Not a perfect biography, but well worth reading. And yes, his love of the theater came through as strongly as the same emotions experienced by those involved in the Papp book.
I haven't been around theater people a lot in my life, but my impression has always been that they are special. In a lot of places you can't make a living as a director, producer, or actor in plays. But everyone involved has a great love for their art and that enthusiasm is infectious. So they do it, because of that great love.
I think that it was those thoughts, and the memory of the Papp book, that motivated me to pick up Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard. I'd heard of him, of course, and had read about his many successful plays, but I'd never seen one. The only Stoppard-written production I'd seen was "Shakespeare in Love," which I enjoyed. But it was something about the magic of the theater that made me want to read the book.
Overall, the book is quite good, and very detailed. Stoppard has been a very prolific writer over his lengthy career, and the author included synopses of nearly everything he wrote. That information is helpful if you haven't seen a lot of the plays. The themes and ideas are fascinating.
I found that I really liked the early part of the book, which detailed Stoppard's childhood, schooling and his early work in journalism. Somehow Stoppard was a more interesting person before he became the great playwright. And the sections about his Czech background were well researched and interesting to read. It was a background that he placed way in the background for most of his life.
After that, the book was almost dizzying in its detail about the plays, actors, producers, agents, the honors he received, the parties he attended, the celebrities he socialized with, the women he loved, most of whom seemed to be committed to other men before Stoppard came into their lives. A lot of detail and mostly enjoyable to read.
There were a couple of things that nagged at me. One was the idea that despite all of the detail and the research that obviously went into the book, we weren't really getting to know Stoppard in depth. It was a little like the criticism sometimes leveled at his plays. They were intellectually challenging, for sure, but where was the emotion? Stoppard had a reputation for being unrevealing about his personal life, and a suspicion of biographers (though he chose this one), so it looked a bit like the book suffered from those factors.
The tone of the book is very favorable . There are likely good reasons for that, what is there to dislike about the man? Still, he wasn't perfect. Certainly a bit of a womanizer for one thing. But he is also a charming man and it seemed that the author was charmed by her subject.
The last chapter really turned it around for me. There was the a story about Stoppard reading critical comments in a book to the effect that he was one of those people, specifically a Jewish person who lived in Europe during the Holocaust, who pretended that he didn't have all of these tragedies close to him in his past. How he pretended that he was always English. To his credit, Stoppard took the criticism to heart and did some serious thinking and studying and then wrote "Leopoldstadt." In the same chapter, the author gets out from behind the screen and talks about her one-on-one contact with Stoppard. It was all very effective. I felt that I learned more about him in the last chapter than I had in all of the chapters that preceded it.
Lee is an excellent writer, and she has a fascinating subject. Not a perfect biography, but well worth reading. And yes, his love of the theater came through as strongly as the same emotions experienced by those involved in the Papp book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 20, 2022
Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard A Life, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf,
23 Feb 2021.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.
Tom Stoppard A Life is an immense book – in concept, execution, and size. In case the last detail is daunting, Hermione Lee has used every bit of content, each word, the descriptions and observations with meticulous intent and elegance. Stoppard’s childhood, leaving behind the Nazi threat, escape to Singapore and early life in India, then to England which became a beloved haven and home; his family relationships, friendships and marriages; conservative politics, so often at odds with friends, partners and this reviewer; the peripatetic life following production of his plays; his plethora of other writing; and – so much joy here – descriptions of so many of the plays, the backgrounds, the rewriting, the highs and the lows.
The early part of Tom Stoppard’s life, as Tomik Straussler, child of Jewish Czechoslovakian refugees in Singapore, refers to his first memories, including knowing that his father must have been with the family on a beach he recalls, but has been lost to memory. His “Czech-ness” was less forgotten than unrealised, producing various responses throughout his life. So, too, did the forces that affected Europe and his ancestors, providing a fascinating start to this biography, introducing the family members and ties to a past that, by the time Stoppard meets the remaining members of his family have been lost. Throughout the biography there is a sense of loss which has been sensitively wrought through introducing this early historical perspective. The life of a successful writer, playwright, scriptwriter for Hollywood successes is more exciting; and the life of a loving son and father, of a husband and friend is more interesting. However, this early section of the book, for me, was particularly moving with its almost lyrical language weaving a story beside the fraught events impacting Stoppard’s ancestors and his own early life.
Stoppard’s beginnings as a journalist, borrowing money, loved wholeheartedly by his mother and unwillingly accepted by his stepfather are perceptively described in the early chapters. The enthralling world of burgeoning success is full of remarkable detail. So much time is given to discussing Stoppard’s manner of working, both with the initial script, then finding the most suitable actors, and working with them as the play came to fruition. Most generous is discussion of the plays. This was particularly illuminating, and a valuable resource for anyone who wants to try to understand, to become part of, or even to become fully immersed in Stoppard’s world on the stage.
Although the plays would be accepted as the focus of the biography, Lee gives far more. All Stoppard’s work is carefully considered, so the whole of his stupendous achievements in prose, poetry, theatre, and film are laid out to be relished. Stoppard’s personal life is an important part of the biography but does not take over – the biography not only describes his personal life as existing happily, and sometimes not, alongside his working life, but shows how full both were.
This is a thrilling biography, not only because of the stature of its subject, but because of the engaging writing, attention to detail, and perceptiveness of Hemione Lee. Long it may be, but boring never. I thoroughly enjoyed this engrossing and enlightening read.
23 Feb 2021.
Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.
Tom Stoppard A Life is an immense book – in concept, execution, and size. In case the last detail is daunting, Hermione Lee has used every bit of content, each word, the descriptions and observations with meticulous intent and elegance. Stoppard’s childhood, leaving behind the Nazi threat, escape to Singapore and early life in India, then to England which became a beloved haven and home; his family relationships, friendships and marriages; conservative politics, so often at odds with friends, partners and this reviewer; the peripatetic life following production of his plays; his plethora of other writing; and – so much joy here – descriptions of so many of the plays, the backgrounds, the rewriting, the highs and the lows.
The early part of Tom Stoppard’s life, as Tomik Straussler, child of Jewish Czechoslovakian refugees in Singapore, refers to his first memories, including knowing that his father must have been with the family on a beach he recalls, but has been lost to memory. His “Czech-ness” was less forgotten than unrealised, producing various responses throughout his life. So, too, did the forces that affected Europe and his ancestors, providing a fascinating start to this biography, introducing the family members and ties to a past that, by the time Stoppard meets the remaining members of his family have been lost. Throughout the biography there is a sense of loss which has been sensitively wrought through introducing this early historical perspective. The life of a successful writer, playwright, scriptwriter for Hollywood successes is more exciting; and the life of a loving son and father, of a husband and friend is more interesting. However, this early section of the book, for me, was particularly moving with its almost lyrical language weaving a story beside the fraught events impacting Stoppard’s ancestors and his own early life.
Stoppard’s beginnings as a journalist, borrowing money, loved wholeheartedly by his mother and unwillingly accepted by his stepfather are perceptively described in the early chapters. The enthralling world of burgeoning success is full of remarkable detail. So much time is given to discussing Stoppard’s manner of working, both with the initial script, then finding the most suitable actors, and working with them as the play came to fruition. Most generous is discussion of the plays. This was particularly illuminating, and a valuable resource for anyone who wants to try to understand, to become part of, or even to become fully immersed in Stoppard’s world on the stage.
Although the plays would be accepted as the focus of the biography, Lee gives far more. All Stoppard’s work is carefully considered, so the whole of his stupendous achievements in prose, poetry, theatre, and film are laid out to be relished. Stoppard’s personal life is an important part of the biography but does not take over – the biography not only describes his personal life as existing happily, and sometimes not, alongside his working life, but shows how full both were.
This is a thrilling biography, not only because of the stature of its subject, but because of the engaging writing, attention to detail, and perceptiveness of Hemione Lee. Long it may be, but boring never. I thoroughly enjoyed this engrossing and enlightening read.
August 29, 2022
Prolific life and an amazing person.
The biography is extremely long, I suppose it had to be to do justice to the man and his works
Here are my favorite lines from the book:
consider
“I like having some money. The best way to gauge wealth is to consider the amount of money which you can spend thoughtlessly—a casual purchase which simply doesn’t register. The really rich can do it in Cartier’s; I’m quite happy if I can do it in a good book-shop or a good restaurant.”
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 210). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
What is the relation between belief and morality? In a context of cultural instability and scepticism, can the existence of God be proved, and a claim be made for universal moral values? For a writer who was not conspicuously religious or moralising, whose default position was uncertainty and ambivalence, and who wanted above all to entertain his audience, putting these questions on stage was a major, self-made, intellectual challenge. And, once aired, these questions never went away. His characters were still arguing over them, thirty years later, in The Hard Problem.
Havel had a down-to-earth approach to big political questions. He believed that “sober perseverance” was more effective than histrionic gestures. He had a strong sense of “the essential aims of life”: “some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being.” He knew how small individual acts can slowly grow into a movement for social change. He knew too that under certain circumstances—as in his country in the 1960s and 1970s—everyone was capable of living a lie, of merging with the crowd, of giving up. But challenges to individuals and to particular communities have a ripple effect. “Whenever freedom and human dignity are threatened in any one country, they are under threat everywhere.” Stoppard found these ways of thinking about the world and one’s place in it deeply sympathetic.
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 413). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Russia, unlike Haiti, etc, is one of the great and powerful nations which, like America and Europe, considers that it represents a norm and a standard and a type of society which aspires to be a model for the world in general…so it merits scrutiny just as Britain or France or America do, but in the latter case the scrutiny can come from within—abuses are frequent and widespread but at least they are a) acknowledged as abuses, ie the system going wrong and b) subject to examination by press and TV and c) subject to correction by the law of the land. But in Russia the abuses are a) the system working as designed b) not subject to examination or criticism and c) not subject to law because the legislature is not separated from the government as it is in the West…so I think it’s right to “interfere.”
Once he vanishes, he becomes his admirers. His life turns into the work he has left behind, and into other people’s stories, legends, anecdotes and versions of him—of which this book is one.
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 1070). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The biography is extremely long, I suppose it had to be to do justice to the man and his works
Here are my favorite lines from the book:
consider
“I like having some money. The best way to gauge wealth is to consider the amount of money which you can spend thoughtlessly—a casual purchase which simply doesn’t register. The really rich can do it in Cartier’s; I’m quite happy if I can do it in a good book-shop or a good restaurant.”
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 210). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
What is the relation between belief and morality? In a context of cultural instability and scepticism, can the existence of God be proved, and a claim be made for universal moral values? For a writer who was not conspicuously religious or moralising, whose default position was uncertainty and ambivalence, and who wanted above all to entertain his audience, putting these questions on stage was a major, self-made, intellectual challenge. And, once aired, these questions never went away. His characters were still arguing over them, thirty years later, in The Hard Problem.
Havel had a down-to-earth approach to big political questions. He believed that “sober perseverance” was more effective than histrionic gestures. He had a strong sense of “the essential aims of life”: “some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being.” He knew how small individual acts can slowly grow into a movement for social change. He knew too that under certain circumstances—as in his country in the 1960s and 1970s—everyone was capable of living a lie, of merging with the crowd, of giving up. But challenges to individuals and to particular communities have a ripple effect. “Whenever freedom and human dignity are threatened in any one country, they are under threat everywhere.” Stoppard found these ways of thinking about the world and one’s place in it deeply sympathetic.
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 413). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Russia, unlike Haiti, etc, is one of the great and powerful nations which, like America and Europe, considers that it represents a norm and a standard and a type of society which aspires to be a model for the world in general…so it merits scrutiny just as Britain or France or America do, but in the latter case the scrutiny can come from within—abuses are frequent and widespread but at least they are a) acknowledged as abuses, ie the system going wrong and b) subject to examination by press and TV and c) subject to correction by the law of the land. But in Russia the abuses are a) the system working as designed b) not subject to examination or criticism and c) not subject to law because the legislature is not separated from the government as it is in the West…so I think it’s right to “interfere.”
Once he vanishes, he becomes his admirers. His life turns into the work he has left behind, and into other people’s stories, legends, anecdotes and versions of him—of which this book is one.
Lee, Hermione. Tom Stoppard (p. 1070). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2021
I got this book from the library because I've seen and loved several Stoppard plays on Broadway, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Thing. I recently saw Arcadia in Berkeley and found it pretentious and (I think) wrong about the implications of relativity theory for epistemology. I wanted a book that explained more about Stoppard's plays. Lee is best at interpreting his play about love and betrayal, The Real Thing; worst at explaining his intellectual plays like Jumpers. She gives a whole chapter to Arcadia, but quite honestly, I think the Wikipedia entry is more intelligible. Another problem is that it's hard to read about a play one has never seen and is unlikely to see.
In my opinion, it would have been a better book if it were half the length. Personally, I found most of the stuff about Stoppard's youth pretty uninteresting, and his letters to the first woman he fell for, Isabel, cringe-worthy. And do we really need to know than about Stoppard's need for dental plates in his 50's? I love gossip, but Lee is strangely restrained on why his 20-year marriage to Miriam ended. We hear both that "there wasn't enough love" and that he loved her so much. Maybe Lee doesn't know because Stoppard didn't tell her. Maybe Stoppard doesn't know. However, we do get a good sense of a man who is not only brilliant, but also kind (although, as he says about himself, not as nice as he seems) and very very funny.
The book gets really interesting at about p. 350. Stoppard has been unbelievably prolific, and I didn't know half of the stuff he's done. Because of reading the book, I tried the movie version of Rosencrantz, which he wrote and directed. I found it unwatchable, as did a lot of critics, but apparently not Pinter. I would love to see revivals of his better-known plays, like Jumpers and Travesties, and some of the lesser-known ones, like Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015) which, like many of his plays, is about things that seem unrelated, like families and how consciousness is possible and the Holocaust. Stoppard didn't find out that he was Jewish on both sides and that many of his relatives died in the Holocaust until late in life.
If what you want is every detail of Tom Stoppard's life, and are willing to read 750 plus pages, you will love this book. Otherwise, my advice would be to skim the first 350 pages and then slow down.
In my opinion, it would have been a better book if it were half the length. Personally, I found most of the stuff about Stoppard's youth pretty uninteresting, and his letters to the first woman he fell for, Isabel, cringe-worthy. And do we really need to know than about Stoppard's need for dental plates in his 50's? I love gossip, but Lee is strangely restrained on why his 20-year marriage to Miriam ended. We hear both that "there wasn't enough love" and that he loved her so much. Maybe Lee doesn't know because Stoppard didn't tell her. Maybe Stoppard doesn't know. However, we do get a good sense of a man who is not only brilliant, but also kind (although, as he says about himself, not as nice as he seems) and very very funny.
The book gets really interesting at about p. 350. Stoppard has been unbelievably prolific, and I didn't know half of the stuff he's done. Because of reading the book, I tried the movie version of Rosencrantz, which he wrote and directed. I found it unwatchable, as did a lot of critics, but apparently not Pinter. I would love to see revivals of his better-known plays, like Jumpers and Travesties, and some of the lesser-known ones, like Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and The Hard Problem (2015) which, like many of his plays, is about things that seem unrelated, like families and how consciousness is possible and the Holocaust. Stoppard didn't find out that he was Jewish on both sides and that many of his relatives died in the Holocaust until late in life.
If what you want is every detail of Tom Stoppard's life, and are willing to read 750 plus pages, you will love this book. Otherwise, my advice would be to skim the first 350 pages and then slow down.
February 7, 2024
Done! Thirty-eight hours later. LOL. Biography is my favorite genre of books, and biographies of playwrights and novelists are what I find most fascinating. Richard Ellmann's bio of Oscar Wilde, John Lahr's bios of Joe Orton and Tennessee Williams, and Andrew Wilson's bio of Patricia Highsmith are the cream of the crop on my bookshelf.
Now I can add one more to that list of top titles: Hermione Lee's "Tom Stoppard: A Life." (A rare "straight" writer in my collection.) It's the first one about a living subject too, so I suppose someday another chapter might be added to future editions. He's not dead yet!
What a fascinating life he has had so far. So many great plays that are part of our Western dramatic canon now. His small "c" conservative politics aren't as frightening to me as the large "C" Conservatives we get in the U.S. After all, he did vote remain on the Brexit question and was tight friends with Harold Pinter and Mike Nichols, so I can't fault him his small c I guess. Besides, Patricia Highsmith's politics were absolutely horrific but I enjoyed reading about her curmudgeonly life as a mid-century lesbian in NYC.
I highly recommend this if you're a fan of his plays ("Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead," "Arcadia," "Rock and Roll," "Leopoldstadt") or are interested in European and literary history. He came originally from Czechoslovakia but then to England by way of India and identifies strongly as British. It's an amazing path through life, and I admire a biographer who can lay it all out for the reader in such a comprehensive and digestible story.
Now I can add one more to that list of top titles: Hermione Lee's "Tom Stoppard: A Life." (A rare "straight" writer in my collection.) It's the first one about a living subject too, so I suppose someday another chapter might be added to future editions. He's not dead yet!
What a fascinating life he has had so far. So many great plays that are part of our Western dramatic canon now. His small "c" conservative politics aren't as frightening to me as the large "C" Conservatives we get in the U.S. After all, he did vote remain on the Brexit question and was tight friends with Harold Pinter and Mike Nichols, so I can't fault him his small c I guess. Besides, Patricia Highsmith's politics were absolutely horrific but I enjoyed reading about her curmudgeonly life as a mid-century lesbian in NYC.
I highly recommend this if you're a fan of his plays ("Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead," "Arcadia," "Rock and Roll," "Leopoldstadt") or are interested in European and literary history. He came originally from Czechoslovakia but then to England by way of India and identifies strongly as British. It's an amazing path through life, and I admire a biographer who can lay it all out for the reader in such a comprehensive and digestible story.
March 4, 2021
If I wasn't a big Stoppard fan, this would probably be a 3-star. I missed having more discussion and comments from his collaborators, and the second half (as he becomes more famous) gets more and more name-droppy. Mentioning Mick Jagger three times I can understand, twenty -- not so much. There were also several repetitions that I was surprised weren't caught in editing.
The first half is by far the most interesting, what with his boyhood escape to India via Singapore and his short journalistic career. It's clear that Stoppard reads exhaustively, yet Lee tells us that the household was not a literary one (which I believe) and since he didn't go to university, where and when he got his love for books isn't clear. I also found her long (5-6) page summaries of the plays distracting. I would have much rather heard from actors and directors who gave their insights into the characters than what appears in the book. There's no in-depth commentary from his wives and lovers, which seems a missed opportunity. I'm sure they'd all be gracious; it's not that I'm looking for dirt, but just a more intimate view of his psychology would be welcome. I'd also have liked more first-person Stoppard. The anecdotes that are there are delightful, but the merely factual becomes rather dull in comparison.
The first half is by far the most interesting, what with his boyhood escape to India via Singapore and his short journalistic career. It's clear that Stoppard reads exhaustively, yet Lee tells us that the household was not a literary one (which I believe) and since he didn't go to university, where and when he got his love for books isn't clear. I also found her long (5-6) page summaries of the plays distracting. I would have much rather heard from actors and directors who gave their insights into the characters than what appears in the book. There's no in-depth commentary from his wives and lovers, which seems a missed opportunity. I'm sure they'd all be gracious; it's not that I'm looking for dirt, but just a more intimate view of his psychology would be welcome. I'd also have liked more first-person Stoppard. The anecdotes that are there are delightful, but the merely factual becomes rather dull in comparison.
April 3, 2022
The next time you have a one way 23 hour flight I suggest you bring this along for entertainment. You might be finished when you return home. I feel like I have a PHd in Tom Stoppard. I am fascinated with him and his plays although I have only see a few of his huge repertoire. If you read this you will know all about the writing of every play and the many revisions, the casting and stage direction, challenges of each of the productions and the many reviews of each. His contract always stipulates he has approval of the director, the casting and the staging. Consider the travel time on his part each time a play opens in NYC, Philly or San Francisco, he goes for weeks at a time to help cast, rehearse and do the previews and opening nights. He usually gives a party for the cast. He also did a lot of screen play work which was well paid and not always credited. Stephen Spielberg used him frequently which surprised me and I think he should get credit for much of the humor in many of his films, including Indiana Jones—the witty repartee between father and son, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford for example. The book represents a staggering amount of research. The e-version runs over 6,000 pages. I loved it but it is a commitment. It makes me want to read other biographies by the author, Hermione Lee.
April 10, 2022
Hermione Lee's comprehensive, 750-page biography of the great British playwright Tom Stoppard is fascinating and well-written. Stoppard's eventful life matches any of his stage works. As a child he and his family fled Czechoslovakia to escape Hitler. In Singapore, his father was killed, then he and his brother and mother moved to India where she found work with a shoe company. She eventually met and married an Englishman and took her boys to Great Britain where she urged them to forget their native country and Jewish identity. Stoppard took to his new land and became more British than the British. The early part makes for great reading. When Stoppard becomes an established world-class dramatist, the book becomes a bit like a social calendar with long entries on the subject's speaking engagements, vacation plans and domestic arrangements with four different wives and various lovers including actresses Felicity Kendall and Sinead Cusack, rehearsal schedules, international flights to accept awards, political speeches and advocacy work, etc. But there are also cogent and detailed analysis of all of his many plays including adaptations of European authors' works and screenplays and TV series. Just as I finished, it was announced that his last play Leopoldstadt is coming to Broadway, so the timing was perfect.
February 27, 2021
Absolute doorstopper of a book which really only works for a Stoppard obsessive. It's a bit like one of his plays - long and incomprehensible in places but strangely fascinating and worth the effort. As I am, if not a nutter for Stoppard, an aspirant to understanding a little of what he's on about, I was quite happy to wade through a bonkers amount of details about how Stoppard grew up and which plays stand a chance of lasting. Lee is great at showing but not explaining, which means one has to know an awful lot already about the plays in order to have those "Aha!" moments that the best biographies can bring. I do think she got a bit cozy with Stoppard and what access he chose to give. Her selective focus means we don't get much about his relationships and what those close to him Really Think About Tom, but unless you're a stalker, we don't need an expose on who shagged what over the past seventy years. Reading all the details about the plays is truly impressive with the scale of the research but exhausting to the max. I still long to see his latest play, Leopoldstadt, which I loved reading, but that can't compare to live theater - rather like reading this book about Stoppard as opposed to living his extraordinary life. And more pictures would have been nice, for the length of the book - we deserve the jam after wading through all of that text!
May 14, 2021
When I was finishing Hermoine Lee's Virginia Woolf biography, I put it down during the early 1941 section, kinnowing the tragedy that was to come, I just dreaded going through it again.
This time, I dreaded finishing this biography because it has been such a delight from start to finish.
I was an early advocate of Stoppard's work (in 1975 I was already using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in acting class, and saw Jumpers at ACT that same year); every time I've seen one of his plays it has been both mind-boggling and heart-stopping; I was eager to learn more about "the best man in the world" who created the best plays of the past 100 years (I put him up on a pedestal with Shaw and Shakespeare) and Hermoine Lee didn't disappoint me, covering his life's journey in depth with sympathy and understanding.
I, too, am descended from Czecks, although not the Jewish part of that population. Nevertheless, I identified with and sympathized with the depiction of his mother, whose nature overlapped my own mother's very neatly.
And stick with it, once you start, it only gets better as it goes along, tying up loose ends and making vital connections; the ending might in fact be the best part (Tom Stoppard still lives...)
This time, I dreaded finishing this biography because it has been such a delight from start to finish.
I was an early advocate of Stoppard's work (in 1975 I was already using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in acting class, and saw Jumpers at ACT that same year); every time I've seen one of his plays it has been both mind-boggling and heart-stopping; I was eager to learn more about "the best man in the world" who created the best plays of the past 100 years (I put him up on a pedestal with Shaw and Shakespeare) and Hermoine Lee didn't disappoint me, covering his life's journey in depth with sympathy and understanding.
I, too, am descended from Czecks, although not the Jewish part of that population. Nevertheless, I identified with and sympathized with the depiction of his mother, whose nature overlapped my own mother's very neatly.
And stick with it, once you start, it only gets better as it goes along, tying up loose ends and making vital connections; the ending might in fact be the best part (Tom Stoppard still lives...)
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