Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Although Stoppard's language and imagery are exquisitely British, he was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His father, Eugene Straussler, worked as an in-house doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company. In 1939, his family -- Jewish, though Tom wouldn't know to what degree until years later -- fled the country of his birth just before the Nazis invaded. Settling in Singapore with his father, his mother, Martha, and his older brother, Tomas attended an English convent school until 1942, when the Japanese invaded Singapore and he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother. His father was taken to a Japanese prison camp, where he died.
The rest of the family found its way to Darjeeling, India, where Martha found a job with Bata. Tomas was sent to an American-run multiracial boarding school. But in late 1945, Martha wed Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army, who shared his surname with his new stepsons and moved the family to England with him after the war. Dispatched to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, Stoppard found relative stability. Although the family moved around a bit before settling in Bristol in 1950, Stoppard has said the main features of his schoolboy years were "a privileged education, a lovely house, acres of parkland."
With adolescence, Stoppard grew restless. In 1954, at age 17, he found himself "bored by the idea of anything intellectual." So he dropped out of school, moved in with his folks and got himself a job as a junior reporter at Bristol's Western Daily Press. Within two years he was writing feature stories, but he calls his early journalism "indefatigably facetious" and self-referential.
Nevertheless, in 1958, the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard a position as a feature writer, humor columnist and second-string drama critic, which brought him into the world of theater. At the Bristol Old Vic, in those days an extremely well-regarded regional repertory company, Stoppard formed friendships with actor Peter O'Toole and director John Boorman, early in their careers. And Stoppard himself became something of a notorious figure in Bristol, known more for his strained attempts at humor and exceedingly unstylish clothes (rock-star good looks notwithstanding) than for his writing.
Stoppard was, he told the New York Times in 1972, "an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses." Stoppard longed, it seemed, to write for the theater rather than about it. And so, in 1960, after celebrating his 23rd birthday, he quit his newspaper job (though he did arrange a columnist gig to fall back on), and set about accomplishing his goal. Three months later, he'd written his first full-length play, "A Walk on the Water."
It was a play of its time, like the work of so many other "angry young men," inspired by John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," which had caused a sensation in 1956. "In England at that time seven out of 10 who wanted to write were writing plays," Stoppard recalled in a 1977 interview. "Of these, four would be carbon copies of 'Look Back in Anger,' and the other three of 'Waiting for Godot.'"
His own first work, he says, owed so much to Robert Bolt's "Flowering Cherry" and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" that he has since been moved to dub it "Flowering Death of a Cherry Salesman." No matter, less than a week after Stoppard sent "A Walk on the Water" to an agent, he received "one of those Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives." The play was optioned and was later staged in Hamburg and aired on British Independent Television.
Around that same time, Stoppard moved to London and began working as a drama critic for the short-lived Scene magazine. He tried his hand at other forms of writing, including short stories, radio plays (several of which were produced) and short television pieces. But Stoppard recalls being told by one TV exec that he should "stick to theater." That, as it turned out, agreed with Tom. "I wanted to be in the theater," he writes in the introduction to a collection of his works for the small screen. "It is simply the way I felt."
In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant allowed Stoppard to spend five months writing in a Berlin mansion. He emerged with a one-act verse play called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear." This evolved into Stoppard's first big theatrical hit, the full-length absurdist romp "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," a comic retelling of "Hamlet" from the perspective of two of its minor characters.
When "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1966, Stoppard felt it was received "politely rather than with hilarity." But the play attracted the notice of critics. This led to a National Theatre production in 1967, under the supervision of Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, which in turn brought Stoppard, then the youngest playwright to have had his work mounted at the National, glowing notices and a bevy of prestigious awards.
It also brought him a New York production seven months later. A few critics sniffed that the play was derivative, drawing strongly not only from "Hamlet" but also from Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," with dashes of Pirandello. But most critics lauded the work, which scintillates with Stoppard's signature clever wordplay and quick-cut banter:
Ros: I want to go home.Guil: Don't let them confuse you.
Ros: I'm out of my step here --
Guil: We'll soon be home and high -- dry and home -- I'll --
Ros: It's all over my depth --
Guil: -- I'll hie you home and --
Ros: -- out of my head --
Guil: -- dry you high and --
Ros (cracking, high): -- over my step over my head body! -- I tell you it's all stopping to a death, it's boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it's all heading to a dead stop --
Guil (the nursemaid): There! ... and we'll soon be home and dry ... and high and dry ... (Rapidly.) Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven't the faintest idea how to spell the word -- "wife" -- or "house" -- because when you write it down, you just can't remember ever having seen those letters in that order before ...?
The New Yorker called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" "a dazzling compassionate fantasy." It won both the Tony and the Drama Critics' Circle awards for best play of 1967-68.
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