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Tom Stoppard: A Life
Tom Stoppard is one of the greatest living English playwrights. In this portrait, Ira Nadel weaves Stoppard's life and work into a work of critical biography. Peopled with such theatrical luminaries as Diana Rigg and John Wood as well as newcomers like Gwyneth Paltrow, the book untangles the strands of Stoppard's genius and conflicted identity against the backdrop of Broadway, Hollywood, London's West End and the theatrical beehive of London's National Theatre in its early days. Nadel looks at Stoppard's early years in Eastern Europe, his time in India and his ultimate emigration to the United Kingdom where he, the Czech-born son of Jewish parents, became the quintessential Englishman. Tom Stoppard: A Life weaves in and out of the reality of Tom Stoppard's life and its frequent fractured Stoppardian depiction on the stage. As Stoppard readies his newest play, a trilogy entitled The Coast of Utopia, for the National Theatre, Ira Nadel paints a portrait of Tom Stoppard that will be must-reading for his legions of admirers.
146 pages, Hardcover
First published January 28, 2002
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 1, 2025
Plays are seen as a bit of a rarified medium nowadays, but if there’s anyone whose work should be watched and read as much as possible by as many people as possible, it’s Tom Stoppard. His whole modus operandi was showing that you could – and indeed you should – create fun and excitement and play from serious moral and political questions.
I discovered him at school – not on the stage, but in the library, by stumbling on the little Faber & Faber scripts in the drama section. I was obsessed with the intellectual brilliance, the sparkling wordplay, just the conspicuous wit in everything he wrote. A lot of people had their doubts about his status, at least before he became enshrined as an icon. When I was reading English & Theatre in the late 90s, my professor refused to have him on the syllabus, concluding, as I think many critics did, that anything so entertaining could not be serious.
If the plays were just entertaining (and some, like The Real Inspector Hound or On The Razzle, were primarily that), that would have been enough and more given the skill involved. But my professor was of course wrong. What the best critics quickly realised was that in the case of Stoppard, the lightness of tone was itself a moral quality. One that gave him a way of broaching big ideas without the emotional heat of partisanship.
He famously said – it was probably in this biography where I first read it – that he wrote drama because it was the only respectable way of disagreeing with yourself, and in the many passionate arguments between characters in his plays, which make them such exciting battles of ideas, you do often feel that Stoppard has not yet come down on one side or another of these debates, that he is following along with as much conflicted vacillation as anyone else.
Hearing of his death is especially sad because of how few people have followed in his footsteps (Michael Frayn perhaps?). You only have to open a page of Jumpers, or Travesties, or Arcadia (perhaps his masterpiece) to see that absolutely no one is writing like this anymore, and very few have the skill even to attempt it. Part of it is perhaps (as Kenneth Tynan liked to observe of Stoppard) that he was the quintessential émigré writer. He was nine when his Czechoslovakian Jewish family finally settled in England (he called himself a ‘bounced Czech’), and although he never lost the accent, he was passionate about his adopted homeland, loving the cricket, the liberalism, the landscapes, and most of all the language, which he perfected in the way that foreign-language learners occasionally do (his proficiency brings to mind Conrad and Nabokov).
But that enthusiastic Englishness, in tone and outlook, is something that already seems strangely of the past, and it’s hard to imagine migrants growing up in today’s Britain with the same attitudes. There was a distant sense behind Stoppard’s exuberance that becoming English, culturally at least, was still like getting the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not even the most gung-ho Anglophile would make that argument now – though if they did, few things would support the case better than the works of Tom Stoppard.
(Nov 25)
I discovered him at school – not on the stage, but in the library, by stumbling on the little Faber & Faber scripts in the drama section. I was obsessed with the intellectual brilliance, the sparkling wordplay, just the conspicuous wit in everything he wrote. A lot of people had their doubts about his status, at least before he became enshrined as an icon. When I was reading English & Theatre in the late 90s, my professor refused to have him on the syllabus, concluding, as I think many critics did, that anything so entertaining could not be serious.
If the plays were just entertaining (and some, like The Real Inspector Hound or On The Razzle, were primarily that), that would have been enough and more given the skill involved. But my professor was of course wrong. What the best critics quickly realised was that in the case of Stoppard, the lightness of tone was itself a moral quality. One that gave him a way of broaching big ideas without the emotional heat of partisanship.
He famously said – it was probably in this biography where I first read it – that he wrote drama because it was the only respectable way of disagreeing with yourself, and in the many passionate arguments between characters in his plays, which make them such exciting battles of ideas, you do often feel that Stoppard has not yet come down on one side or another of these debates, that he is following along with as much conflicted vacillation as anyone else.
Hearing of his death is especially sad because of how few people have followed in his footsteps (Michael Frayn perhaps?). You only have to open a page of Jumpers, or Travesties, or Arcadia (perhaps his masterpiece) to see that absolutely no one is writing like this anymore, and very few have the skill even to attempt it. Part of it is perhaps (as Kenneth Tynan liked to observe of Stoppard) that he was the quintessential émigré writer. He was nine when his Czechoslovakian Jewish family finally settled in England (he called himself a ‘bounced Czech’), and although he never lost the accent, he was passionate about his adopted homeland, loving the cricket, the liberalism, the landscapes, and most of all the language, which he perfected in the way that foreign-language learners occasionally do (his proficiency brings to mind Conrad and Nabokov).
But that enthusiastic Englishness, in tone and outlook, is something that already seems strangely of the past, and it’s hard to imagine migrants growing up in today’s Britain with the same attitudes. There was a distant sense behind Stoppard’s exuberance that becoming English, culturally at least, was still like getting the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not even the most gung-ho Anglophile would make that argument now – though if they did, few things would support the case better than the works of Tom Stoppard.
(Nov 25)
November 16, 2024
In 1985 I was fortunate enough to see Felicity Kendal on stage with Paul Eddington in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (‘there’s a corpse in the cupboard!’) at the Aldwych Theatre in London. It was a wonderful production and the leads were as entrancing as one would wish.
So, selfishly perhaps, my interest in this biography of Tom Stoppard is his relationship with said Felicity Kendal, because (a) it was significant professionally and personally and (b) Kendal omitted any reference to it in her excellent and otherwise forthcoming autobiography White Cargo: A Memoir, which I enjoyed, especially her peripatetic childhood in India as the youngest member of father Geoffrey Kendal’s theatrical troupe, celebrated in Shakespeare Wallah.
Kendal first met Stoppard in 1981. He subsequently cast her in his adaptation of a German play On the Razzle, (1981) as a boy; Annie in The Real Thing (1982); the aforementioned Jumpers, as Dotty; and Hapgood (1988) in the title role. Their personal relationship spanned the years 1989 to 1997, give or take, during which she was Stoppard’s ‘leading lady on and off the stage.’ (p248):
We don’t learn much about Stoppard and Kendal’s life together, which is, I suppose, fair enough, it’s their business. We do learn that their association began professionally in 1981 and spanned nearly two decades until Stoppard’s adaptation of Chekov’s The Seagull in 1997. Their personal interregnum was shorter and as they say, they maintained separate residences. At one stage Ira Nadel has to content himself with a detailed real estate discussion of their various separate abodes during the years 1993 to 1997. One is nevertheless glad their lives intersected, and admiring of their pledge never to talk about each other.
***
Stoppard has been a playwright for half a century, but he has also done some scintillating film scripting, including two favourites: Empire of the Sun and Shakespeare in Love, for which he won the Academy Award. Both films contain exemplary characterisation. He also helped along the way with Schindler’s List and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is said Stephen Spielberg sent him a bonus after the latter became a substantial success, of one million dollars. (p359)
This is not unprecedented: Alec Guinness received from Spielberg associate George Lucas, an extra quarter percent, making two and a quarter percent all up of the director’s royalties for Star Wars. The reported amount Guinness ultimately received varies, but is generally thought to be in excess of 50 million pounds, well and truly more than he received for the rest of his films put together.
So, selfishly perhaps, my interest in this biography of Tom Stoppard is his relationship with said Felicity Kendal, because (a) it was significant professionally and personally and (b) Kendal omitted any reference to it in her excellent and otherwise forthcoming autobiography White Cargo: A Memoir, which I enjoyed, especially her peripatetic childhood in India as the youngest member of father Geoffrey Kendal’s theatrical troupe, celebrated in Shakespeare Wallah.
Kendal first met Stoppard in 1981. He subsequently cast her in his adaptation of a German play On the Razzle, (1981) as a boy; Annie in The Real Thing (1982); the aforementioned Jumpers, as Dotty; and Hapgood (1988) in the title role. Their personal relationship spanned the years 1989 to 1997, give or take, during which she was Stoppard’s ‘leading lady on and off the stage.’ (p248):
Not only did she fulfil the roles he created for women but she began to shape them. Her influence as a possible muse was exceeded only by her influence on the kind of woman Stoppard created in his plays, including Flora Crewe in In the Native State, the 1991 radio play dedicated to Kendal. Hannah Jarvis in Arcadia is perhaps the quintessential Kendal role: energetic, inquisitive, strong and possessed of The Good Life vibrant celebration of nature. (p319)Kendal was also cast as Flora Crewe in In Indian Ink, the expanded version of In the Native State, about an English poet who visits India in 1930.
We don’t learn much about Stoppard and Kendal’s life together, which is, I suppose, fair enough, it’s their business. We do learn that their association began professionally in 1981 and spanned nearly two decades until Stoppard’s adaptation of Chekov’s The Seagull in 1997. Their personal interregnum was shorter and as they say, they maintained separate residences. At one stage Ira Nadel has to content himself with a detailed real estate discussion of their various separate abodes during the years 1993 to 1997. One is nevertheless glad their lives intersected, and admiring of their pledge never to talk about each other.
***
Stoppard has been a playwright for half a century, but he has also done some scintillating film scripting, including two favourites: Empire of the Sun and Shakespeare in Love, for which he won the Academy Award. Both films contain exemplary characterisation. He also helped along the way with Schindler’s List and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is said Stephen Spielberg sent him a bonus after the latter became a substantial success, of one million dollars. (p359)
This is not unprecedented: Alec Guinness received from Spielberg associate George Lucas, an extra quarter percent, making two and a quarter percent all up of the director’s royalties for Star Wars. The reported amount Guinness ultimately received varies, but is generally thought to be in excess of 50 million pounds, well and truly more than he received for the rest of his films put together.
August 12, 2017
I read half of this book in prep for post-performance talks at the Aurora Theatre Company for The Real Thing. I learned some fascinating things about Stoppard, and would like to go back to finish it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews