Tom Stoppard: A Life (review)

Tom Stoppard is famous as the creator of structurally complex and intellectually challenging plays filled with dazzling verbal dexterity, from the inverted Shakespeare of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) to the sharp portrait of passion in The Real Thing (1982) to the interwoven science and romance of Arcadia (1993). His work—which includes numerous adaptations and some screenplays, most notably Shakespeare in Love (1999)—has won wide acclaim as well as a popular following, making him one of the most successful writers in England. Despite being in the public eye and at the center of British theatrical life for over thirty years, however, Stoppard has been elusive when it comes to his private life. Recently, though, the playwright has been more forthcoming about his past, his personal life, and his opinions. Ira Nadel has taken advantage of this new openness and combined it with thorough research to create the new biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life.

In his plays, Stoppard expresses a deep skepticism about history in general and biography in particular. Indeed, he often builds his dramatic conflicts as well as his cerebral humor on characters "getting it wrong"—they are hapless detectives who fail to get the facts or who completely misunderstand their meaning. The problematics of interpretation apply especially to the reconstruction of a life. As Oscar Wilde declares to A. E. Housman in The Invention of Love (1997), "Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes." But even if people are doomed to endlessly misinterpret, it doesn't stop us (or Stoppard's characters) from searching for the facts and trying to make sense of them. Nadel is keenly aware of these contradictions and difficulties, so he approaches his subject with prudence and writes in scholarly, unpretentious prose. Wisely avoiding the pretense of an intimate portrait that claims to expose hidden emotions and psychology, the book generally sticks to the facts, revealing the shape (if not the essence) of the man's life.

Nadel's book deals primarily with Stoppard's career as a writer, presenting the details of his personal life sparingly, although paying much attention to recently uncovered information about Stoppard's family history and early childhood. Tomás Straüssler was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to middle-class parents who, Stoppard would find out much later in life, were fully (if not observantly) Jewish. Nadel makes much of Stoppard discovering his "Jewish self," although I would argue that it is too early to tell what, if anything, this bit of self-knowledge will mean to Stoppard and his writing. His early years as a refugee—a "bounced Czech" as he would later describe himself—were followed by a conservative upbringing in England with a stepfather who gave him the name Stoppard.

As a student, Stoppard was more interested in cricket than in dramatics, and he left school at seventeen to pursue a career as a journalist in Bristol. Nadel describes England's theatrical renaissance in the late 1950s, fueled primarily by John Osborne's anger, which inspired Stoppard to write for the theatre. Stoppard wrote theatre reviews, radio and television dramas for the BBC, and a novel before earning fame at the age of thirty as the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In one of the book's most exciting sections, Nadel describes this play's rocky road to success with a detailed history of its initial productions, first at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then at the National Theatre. From there, Nadel charts the career of a prolific writer through the original plays, the adaptations, the screenplays, and even the abandoned projects, such as a screenplay for the animated version of Cats.

For theatre scholars and students, this book is at its best when presenting detailed accounts of the production of each new work. Nadel has done excellent research on the influences and sources behind Stoppard's writing; Stoppard's personal process of writing and re-writing...