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American Theater Guide:

Tom Stoppard

Stoppard, Tom [né Thomas Straussler] (b. 1937), playwright. Perhaps the most brilliant (if not widely accessible) modern English playwright, he was first represented on Broadway by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). His later works to reach New York included Jumpers (1974), Travesties (1976), Dirty Linen and New‐Found‐Land (1977), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1979), Night and Day (1980), The Real Thing (1984), Artist Descending a Staircase (1989), Hapgood (1995), Arcadia (1994), The Invention of Love (2001), and Indian Ink (2003). Several of his other plays have been popular with little theatres and elsewhere, although they have been denied the benefit of Broadway's approval. His best plays show a marked influence of the theatre of the absurd but, unlike most examples of the school, also manifest a traditional theatrical construction, superior character development, and gymnastic, witty dialogue. Biography: Tom Stoppard: A Life, Ira Nadel, 2002.

 
 
Writer:

Tom Stoppard

  • Born: Jul 03, 1937 in Zlin (Gottwaldov), Czechoslovakia
  • Occupation: Writer, Director
  • Active: '70s-2000s
  • Major Genres: Drama, Comedy
  • Career Highlights: Brazil, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Empire of the Sun
  • First Major Screen Credit: The Romantic Englishwoman (1975)

Biography

Though his primary profession is as a renowned playwright, the versatile and prolific Tom Stoppard has also carved out a distinguished secondary career as a screenwriter.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Tom Straussler and his family moved to Singapore in 1939 and then to India in 1941 to escape World War II's Axis powers. After his father was killed in Singapore, his mother married a British officer, and the renamed Stoppard family moved to England in 1946. Stoppard began his writing career at age 17, and worked as a journalist from 1954 to 1960. During the early '60s, Stoppard shifted to drama criticism and then fiction plays for TV, radio, and the stage. His 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead turned Stoppard into a theater sensation when it opened in London in 1967. Complex, philosophical, and hilarious, Stoppard's retelling of Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters wittily upended the Shakespeare text with a strong dose of Samuel Beckett-style existentialism.

In the subsequent decades, Stoppard wrote numerous plays remarkable for their wordplay, intelligence, humor, and erudition, whether he was dealing with absurdist farce (Travesties [1974]), modern love (The Real Thing [1982]), international politics (Every Good Boy Deserves Favor [1977]), or sex and science (Arcadia [1993]). Along with his original plays, Stoppard also translated a number of theatrical works by other European writers, including Vaclav Havel and Arthur Schnitzler. Though he once described his screenplays as more craft than art, Stoppard's literate film adaptations of various works by major authors have matched him with some of the most esteemed directors in international cinema, beginning with Joseph Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman in 1975.

Displaying his protean talents, Stoppard adapted Vladimir Nabokov for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's English language black comedy Despair (1978), Graham Greene's spy novel The Human Factor (1979) for Otto Preminger, J.G. Ballard's World War II story Empire of the Sun (1987) for Steven Spielberg, and E.L. Doctorow's gangster saga Billy Bathgate for Robert Benton. Making a foray into the art of original screenplays, Stoppard's collaboration on Terry Gilliam's outrageous, darkly comic science fiction-fantasy Brazil (1985) earned the Tony Award-winning playwright his first Oscar nomination for screenwriting. Stoppard notched another "first" when he agreed to step behind the camera as director in order to secure financing for the 1990 film adaptation of his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Featuring rising British actors Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the title roles, Rosencrantz earned Stoppard the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Humorous reinterpretations of Shakespeare (as well as original screenplays) proved to be auspicious for Stoppard once again, when the costume comedy Shakespeare In Love (1998), about a blocked Will Shakespeare and his Juliet-esque inspiration, earned Stoppard and Marc Norman the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Stoppard has been married twice and has four children. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

 
Biography: Thomas Stoppard

One of England's most important playwrights, Tom Stoppard (born 1937) was popular in the United States as well. His two great stage successes were "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and "The Real Thing".

The son of a doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company, Thomas Straussler (Stoppard) was born on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, Czechoslovakia. According to Nazi racial laws there was "Jewish blood" in the family, so his father was transferred to Singapore in 1939, taking the family with him. When the Japanese invaded that city in 1942, the women and children were taken to India. Dr. Straussler stayed behind and was killed.

Stoppard attended an American boarding school in Darjeeling. In 1945 his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British Army major, and both of her sons took his name. The Stoppards went to England, where Stoppard's stepfather worked in the machine-tool industry. Thomas continued his education at a preparatory school in Yorkshire.

At age 17 he felt that he had had enough schooling and became first a reporter and then a critic for the Western Daily Press of Bristol from 1954 to 1958. He left the Press and worked as a reporter for the Evening World, also in Bristol, from 1958 to 1960. Stoppard then worked as a free-lance reporter from 1960 to 1963. During these years he experimented with writing short stories and short plays. In 1962 he moved to London in order to be closer to the center of the publishing and theatrical worlds in the United Kingdom.

His first radio plays for the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) - The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon Among Other Things - were aired in 1964, with two more, Albert's Bridge and If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, following in 1965. His first television play, A Separate Peace, appeared the next year, as did his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, and the stage play that established his reputation as a playwright, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes two minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet and shows us the world of the Danish prince from a different perspective. Critic Charles Marowitz dubbed the show a "play-beneaththe-play." But it was more than an oblique look at a dramatic classic. It was an examination of existentialist philosophy when the protagonists learn that they are to die and accept their fate. As Marowitz put it, the play "demonstrates a remarkable skill in juggling the donnees of existentialist philosophy…. We are summoned, we come. We are given roles, we play them. We are dismissed, we go." America's influential critic Harold Clurman wrote, "Based on a nice conceit, it is epigrammatically literate, intelligent, theatrically clever." The play earned Stoppard his first Tony award.

That same year, 1966, Stoppard produced Tango, based on a work by Slawomir Mrozek, and in 1967 he produced two television plays, Teeth and Another Moon Called Earth.

The year 1968 saw another television play, Neutral Ground, and two short works for the theater; Enter a Free Man and The Real Inspector Hound. Of the former, critic Brendan Gill wrote that it has "a plot of no very great originality … an ending too neat for its own good," while of the latter another critic, Clive Barnes, opined that it was a "spinoff" from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. He went on, "Here it is two critics watching a conventional murder mystery who eventually find themselves dragged into the action of the play. In a sense the same existentialist attitude…."

In 1970 Stoppard returned to the BBC with the two radio plays, Artist Descending a Staircase and Where Are They Now, and authored the television plays The Engagement and Experiment in Television as well as the stage work After Magritte. It was about this time that Stoppard became acquainted with Ed Berman from New York City's Off-Off-Broadway, who was attempting to establish an alternative theater in London. For him Stoppard composed Dogg's Our Pet, produced in 1971 at the Almost Free Theater; the feeble double bill of Dirty Linen and New-found-land in 1975; and Night and Day in 1978.

In 1972 Stoppard had presented Jumpers, his second major work, which begins with circus acts and evolves into religious and moral philosophy. As critic Victor Cahn put it, "The specific philosophical problem at the basis of George's [the protagonist's] inquiry is whether moral judgments are absolute or relative, whether their truth lies in correspondence with the facts of the world or whether they are … personal expressions of emotion." Jumpers did not enjoy the same critical acclaim that had greeted Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Stanley Kauffmann labeled it "fake, structurally and thematically," while John Simon wrote that "there is even something arrogant about trying to convert the history of Western culture into a series of blackout sketches, which is very nearly what Jumpers is up to." Stoppard wrote the television play One Pair of Eyes with Clive Exton the same year.

Two years later he produced his third major work, Travesties. It was based on the coincidence that Russian exile politician V. I. Lenin, Irish novelist James Joyce, and the father of the French Dadaist movement in literature and art, Tristan Tzara, were all in Zurich, Switzerland, at times during World War I. It is assumed that they never met in actuality, but their interaction in Stoppard's play illuminates the question of what constitutes art. The author's conclusion seems to be that its sole function is to make the meaninglessness of life more bearable.

In 1977 Stoppard offered Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a tour de force premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the 100-piece London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andre Previn at the Royal Festival Hall. Brought to the United States, it was presented at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with an 81-piece orchestra. The play concerns a dissident in an Iron Curtain country who has been placed in a mental institution. Its attack on the totalitarian state was the author's strongest political statement up to that time. That same year he was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1979 came three plays; Undiscovered Country, based on Austrian playwright Artur Schnitzler's Das weite land; Dogg's Hamlet; and Cahoot's Macbeth. In 1982 his fourth major work was produced. The Real Thing won Stoppard his second Tony award in 1984. More psychological than his previous plays, The Real Thing concerns a literary man whose love is unfaithful to him and how he copes with his disillusionment. Again critical opinion was divided: Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman summarized it this way: "He has maintained his humour, increased his complexity, and deepened his art." Robert Brustein, on the other hand, saw it as "another clever exercise in the Mayfair mode, where all of the characters … share the same wit, artifice and ornamental diction."

Stoppard summed up his life's work as an attempt to "make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours."

Further Reading

There are three good biographies and studies: Tom Stoppard by Felicia Hardison Londre (1981), Tom Stoppard by Joan Fitzpatrick Dean (1981), and Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Stoppard by Victor L. Cahn (1979). Another worthwhile appreciation is the chapter on Stoppard in The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies by John Russell Taylor (1971). Also see Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick, Tom Stoppard: Comedy as a Moral Matrix, (University of Missouri Press, 1981).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir Tom Stoppard

(born July 3, 1937, Zlín, Czech.) Czech-born British playwright. After living in East Asia with his family during World War II, he moved to England and adopted his stepfather's surname. His first play, A Walk on the Water, was televised in 1963, and he won fame with the absurdist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966; film, 1990). His later plays, marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious plotting, and a playful interest in pivotal historical moments, include Jumpers (1972), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977; with music by André Previn), The Real Thing (1982), and Arcadia (1993). He has also written radio plays and screenplays for films such as Empire of the Sun (1987) and Shakespeare in Love (1998, Academy Award). Stoppard was knighted in 1997.

For more information on Sir Tom Stoppard, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Stoppard, Tom,
1937–, English playwright, b. Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic), as Tomas Straussler. During his childhood he and his family moved to Singapore, later (1946) settling in Bristol, England, where he became a journalist. In 1960 he moved to London, where he became a theater critic and wrote radio plays. Stoppard first gained prominence with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), a witty drama about peripheral characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. He is noted for his idiosyncratic style, artful and complex construction, deft parody, wide-ranging knowledge, and ability to find significance in wordplay and bizarre juxtapositions of language and character. In Travesties (1974), for example, James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara collaborate on a production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Many critics consider his Jumpers (1973), a play that includes gymnastics, murder, song, dance, and ethical discussion, and Arcadia (1993), a drama that takes place in both 1809 and the early 1990s and is centered on a 19th-century mathematical prodigy and a 20th-century literary scholar, his finest works. Stoppard's other plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968); Dirty Linen (1976); The Real Thing (1982); Hapgood (1988); Indian Ink (1995); The Invention of Love (1997); and Rock 'n' Roll (2006). His trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002) explores the roots of the Russian Revolution via six late 19th-century intellectuals and their associates and spans 35 years.

Stoppard is also a skilled screenwriter; he was a main scriptwriter for Brazil (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987), and won particular acclaim for his Shakespeare in Love (1998, with Marc Norman). He has also has written for television, and is the author of a novel, Lord Malaquist and Mr. Moon (1966), and short stories.

Bibliography

See P. Delaney, ed., Tom Stoppard in Conversation (1994) and M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard (1995, rev. ed. 2003); biography by I. Nadel (2001); studies by R. Hayman (1977), V. L. Cahn (1979), J. Hunter (1982); T. R. Whitaker (1983), M. Page (1986), S. Rusinko (1986), M. Billington (1987), J. Harty, ed. (1988), A. Jenkins (1987, 1990), K. E. Kelly (1991), R. A. Andretta (1992), T. Hodgson (2001); J. Fleming (2001), J. Hunter (1982, 2005), and H. Bloom, ed. (rev. ed. 2003); K. E. Kelly, ed., Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard (2001).

 
Fine Arts Dictionary: Stoppard, Tom

A twentieth-century British playwright who was born in Czechoslovakia. He first achieved acclaim with his Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, which featured Hamlet's “attendant lords,” hilariously alone and adrift on an unknown stage. His other works include Jumpers and Travesties.

 
Quotes By: Tom Stoppard

Quotes:

"Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?"

"Age is a high price to pay for maturity."

"I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon."

"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."

"Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it."

"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."

See more famous quotes by Tom Stoppard

 
Wikipedia: Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard

Pseudonym: William Boot (as a theatre critic)
Born: July 3 1937 (1937--) (age 70)
Zlín, Czechoslovakia
Occupation: Playwright and screenwriter
Nationality: British
Genres: dramatic comedy
Subjects: various, clever wordplay, quick-cut banter[1]
Debut works: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (novel), Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (play)
Influences: Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett

Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE (born as Tomáš Straussler on July 3, 1937)[1] is an Academy Award winning British playwright of more than 24 plays.[1] Born in Czechoslovakia, he is famous for plays such as The Coast of Utopia,[2] The Real Thing,  and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and also for co-writing screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love.[1]

Biography

Stoppard was born on July 3, 1937 in Czechoslovakia[1] and moved to Singapore[1] with other Jews on March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded. However, in 1941 the family had to be evacuated to India, escaping the Japanese invasion of Singapore.[1] His father, Eugene Straussler, remained behind, as British army volunteer and died in a Japanese prison camp after capture.[1]

In India, Stoppard received an English education. In late 1945, his mother Martha married a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard,[1] who gave the boys his English surname and moved the family with him to England after the war, in 1946.[1] Tom was sent to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.[1]

Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist for Western Daily Press in Bristol.[1] In 1958, the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard his position as a feature writer, humor columnist and secondary drama critic, which took Stoppard into the world of theater.[1] At the Bristol Old Vic (at the time a well-regarded regional repertory company),[1] Stoppard formed friendships with director John Boorman and actor Peter O'Toole, early in their careers.[1] Stoppard became a somewhat notorious figure in Bristol, being known more for his strained attempts at humor[1] and unstylish clothes than for his writing.[1]

By 1960, he had completed his first play A Walk on the Water,[1] (which was later re-packaged as 1968's Enter a Free Man). Stoppard noted that this first play owed much to Robert Bolt's "Flowering Cherry" (and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman").[1] Within a week after sending A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard received his version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists' lives."[1] His first play was optioned, later staged in Hamburg, and then broadcast on British Independent Television in 1963.[1]

From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a drama critic for Scene magazine,[1] writing reviews and interviews both under his name and under the pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear"[1] (which later evolved into his Tony-winning play re-titled Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead).[1]

Human rights activity

By 1977, Stoppard had become concerned with human rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe. In February 1977, he visited the Soviet Union (and several Eastern European countries) with a member of Amnesty International.[1] In June, Stoppard met Vladimir Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met dissident playwright and future president Václav Havel.[1] Stoppard became involved with Index on Censorship, Amnesty International, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse[1] and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human rights.[1] Stoppard was also instrumental in translating Havel's works into English.

The Tom Stoppard Prize was created in 1983 (in Stockholm, under the Charter 77 Foundation) and is awarded to authors of Czech origin. In August 2005 Stoppard visited Minsk to give a seminar on playwriting, and to learn first-hand about various human rights and political problems in Belarus.

Work for the theatre

Stoppard's plays are plays of ideas that deal with philosophical issues, yet he combines the philosophical ideas he presents with verbal wit[1] and visual humour. His linguistic complexity, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay,[1] is a chief characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple timelines.

  • (1966) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead[1] is one of Stoppard's most famous works — a comedic play which casts two minor characters from Hamlet as its leads, but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering their predicament. It is similar in many ways to Samuel Beckett's absurdist Waiting for Godot, particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and (in)comprehension of their situation.
  • (1968) Enter a Free Man examines a fabulist's world, which, at the end, sadly collapses into the reality of a mundane and unfulfilled life. It was developed from a 1963 television play A Walk on the Water and first performed on the stage on 28 March 1968 with Michael Hordern in the leading role.
  • (1968) The Real Inspector Hound is one of his best-known short plays. In it two theatre critics are watching a Country House Murder Mystery, and become involved in the action by accident. The viewer is watching a play within a play. In a particularly Stoppardian touch, he based the whodunnit the critics are watching very closely on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, knowing full well that the producers of that play (still running in London's West End) could not complain without drawing attention to the very thing they want to conceal, that Stoppard's play (even its title alone) gives away their "surprise" ending.
  • (1970) After Magritte is a surreal piece which manages to place the characters, through perfectly rational means, into situations worthy of a Magritte painting. It features a husband-and-wife dance team, the rather confused mother of one of them, a detective named Foot and a constable named Holmes; Stoppard notes that it is frequently performed as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound.
  • (1972) Jumpers explores the field of academic philosophy, likening it to a highly skilful competitive gymnastics display. Jumpers raises questions such as what do we know? Where do values come from? It is set in an alternate reality where some British astronauts have landed on the moon and "Radical Liberals" (read Communists) have taken over the British government.
  • (1974) Travesties is a parody of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The play starts from the fact that Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce were all in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1917 (in fact they were there at slightly different times, but Stoppard gets round this by telling the story through the memory of a confused old man, Henry Carr - hence also the facts getting mixed up with the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest, which Carr performed in at the time). There are clear relationships between Joyce's literary work and Tzara's dada art. The relation to Lenin's ideas is less well explained.
  • (1976) Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land combines two one act plays, written to celebrate the British naturalisation of Ed Berman, founder of London’s Almost Free Theatre, where the work was first performed on 6 April 1976 as part of the theatre’s season to celebrate the American bicentennial. Dirty Linen is a farce that portrays a special committee of the House of Commons, appointed to investigate reports that a large number of MPs have been having sex with the same woman. Naturally it contains implied commentary on the government, its workings, its members, and its relationship to the press and to the public. New-Found-Land is a brief interlude in which two government officials try to decide whether to give British citizenship to an eccentric American (based on Berman) and contains an imaginative rhapsody about America.
  • (1977) Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is one of Stoppard's most unusual works. It was written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg. The play calls for a small cast, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an essential part of the action. The play concerns a dissident under an oppressive regime (obviously meant to be taken for a Soviet-controlled state) who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, from which he will not be released until he admits that his statements against the government were caused by a (non-existent) mental disorder.
  • (1978) Night and Day is about journalism. Set in a fictional African country governed by the tyrant Mageeba, the plot involves the interactions of two British reporters and a British photographer and the family of a British mine owner during a period of unrest in the country. The playbill for a Chicago theater company's 1996 performance of this play stated that it was based on Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop.
  • (1979) Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth are two works. In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Cahoot's Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg's Hamlet, and shows a shortened performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret policeman who suspects the actors of subversion against the state.
  • (1979) 15-Minute Hamlet The entire play of Hamlet, only in fifteen minutes. An excerpt from Dogg's Hamlet, it is often performed and published on its own.
  • (1979) Undiscovered Country is an adaptation of Das Weite Land by the esteemed Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler.
  • (1981) On the Razzle is a comedic farce based on a play by 19th century Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Einen Jux will er sich machen (which is the source for Thornton Wilder's plays "The Merchant of Yonkers" and The Matchmaker and the musical Hello, Dolly! as well).
  • (1982) The Real Thing examines love and fidelity, and makes extensive use of play within a play.
  • (1984) Rough Crossing is based on a classic farce by Molnar and takes place on shipboard as two playwrights struggle to finish a musical comedy and rehearse it before docking in New York. Contains numerous references to famous musical comedies such as produced by Gilbert and Sullivan.
  • (1986) Dalliance
  • (1988) Hapgood mixes the themes of espionage and quantum mechanics, especially exploring the idea that in both fields, observing an event changes the nature of the event. He also compares the dual nature of light (is it a wave that sometimes seems like particles, or vice versa) with a double agent who is not sure which side he is really working for.
  • (1993) Arcadia alternates between a pair of present day researchers investigating an early 19th century literary mystery and the real incident they are investigating. It touches on mathematics, thermodynamics, literature, and landscape gardening as it examines the quest for knowledge.
  • (1995) Indian Ink is based on his radio play In The Native State, and examines British rule in India from both sides.
  • (1997) The Invention of Love investigates the life and death of Oxford poet and classicist A. E. Housman, especially his repressed homosexual love for his friend Moses Jackson, contrasting Housman with Oscar Wilde's public fall from grace.
  • (2002) The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy about the origins of modern political radicalism in 19th century Russia. The central figures in the action are Michael Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Alexander Herzen. The work consists of three plays: "Voyage", "Shipwreck", and "Salvage".
  • (2006) Rock 'n' Roll spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher. Stoppard gives the character Max Morrow a surprising number of lines relating to fish pie, thought to be a way of teasing Brian Cox (who played Morrow in the first performances) about an embarrassing TV ad for Young's Fish Pie he had done many years before. Its first public performance (a preview) was 3 June, 2006 at the Royal Court Theatre. It was a controversial addition to the Royal Court's 50th anniversary season, due to the left-leaning nature of much of the Royal Court's work and the anti-communist nature of much of Stoppard's work (including "Rock 'n' Roll" itself).
  • Henry IV is a play written by Luigi Pirandello in Italian. Tom Stoppard's translation of the work is noted for its colloquial dialog.

Work for radio, film, and TV

Tom Stoppard, a screenshot taken from the 1985 documentary "What is Brazil?"
Enlarge
Tom Stoppard, a screenshot taken from the 1985 documentary "What is Brazil?"

In his early years Stoppard wrote extensively for BBC radio, in many cases introducing a touch of surrealism. His original works for radio are:

  • (1964) The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, a 15 minute play in which Dominic travels around London in a taxi trying to raise the money for the mounting fare.
  • (1964) ‘M’ is for Moon amongst Other Things
  • (1966) If you’re Glad I’ll be Frank; bus-driver Frank attempts to liberate his wife Gladys who is trapped as the voice of the speaking clock.
  • (1967) Albert’s Bridge, in which Albert finds solace in his never-ending task as a solitary bridge painter.
  • (1968) Where are They Now?, written for schools radio, the play intercuts a 1969 Old Boys' dinner with the same characters' 1945 school dinner.
  • (1972) Artist Descending a Staircase, a story told by means of multiple levels of nested flashback from the present to 1914 and back again.
  • (1982) The Dog it was that Died
  • (1991) In the Native State, set both in colonial India and present-day England, examining the relationship of the two countries. Stoppard later expanded the work to become the stage play Indian Ink (1995)

Stoppard has also adapted many of his stage works for radio.

In his television play Professional Foul (1977), an English philosophy professor visits Prague, officially to speak at a colloquium, unofficially to watch a football international between England and Czechoslovakia. He meets one of his former students and is persuaded to smuggle the student's dissident thesis out of the country.

He has also adapted many of his own plays for film and TV, notably the 1990 production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Tom Stoppard has written extensively for film and television. Some of his better-known scripts and adaptations include:

It is rumoured that Stoppard assisted George Lucas in polishing up some of the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, though Stoppard received no official or formal credit in this role. He worked in a similar capacity with Tim Burton on his film Sleepy Hollow. He is also rumoured to be writing the script for the 22nd James Bond film, currently under the title of Bond 22.[1]

Awards

He was appointed CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group.

Novel

Stoppard has written one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966). It is set in contemporary London and its cast includes not only the eighteenth century figure of the dandified Malquist and his ineffectual Boswell, Moon, but also a couple of cowboys with live bullets in their six-shooters, a lion (banned from the Ritz) and a donkey-borne Irishman claiming to be the Risen Christ.

Personal life

He has been married twice, to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a nurse, and to Miriam Stoppard (née Miriam Moore-Robinson), (1972–1992), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each marriage, including the actor Ed Stoppard and Will Stoppard, married to violinist, Linzi Stoppard.

Art Charity Involvement

Stoppard is a participant in The one million masterpiece project. His work can be found here: http://www.millionmasterpiece.com/profile-503203

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae 
      "Salon.com People | Tom Stoppard" (biography),
  Amy Reiter, November 2001, webpage:
  Salon-TStoppard.
  2. ^ "BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Stoppard play sweeps Tony awards" BBC News Online, June 2007, webpage: BBC739885.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
The plays of Tom Stoppard
15-Minute Hamlet, After Magritte, Arcadia, Cahoot's Macbeth, The Coast of Utopia, Dalliance, Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, Dogg's Hamlet, Enter a Free Man, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Hapgood, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, Jumpers, Night and Day, On the Razzle, Professional Foul (TV 1978), The Real Inspector Hound, The Real Thing, Rock 'n' Roll, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rough Crossing, Travesties, Undiscovered Country


Persondata
NAME Stoppard, Tom, Sir
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Straussler, Tomáš; Boot, William
SHORT DESCRIPTION British playwright and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Zlín, Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

be-x-old:Том Стопард


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American Theater Guide. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Writer. Copyright © 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Fine Arts Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tom Stoppard".  Read more

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