Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard, born in 1937, English playwright, noted for his ingenious use of language and ironic political metaphors. Stoppard was associated with the continental European theater of the absurd, a movement that lamented the senselessness of the human condition. He fused the English tradition of the “comedy of manners” (a play that satirizes the customs of the upper classes) with contemporary social concerns by concentrating on the intricate and comical duplicities of everyday conversation within a wider, and often menacing, historical perspective.

Born Tomas Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic), the son of a physician who was later killed by the Nazis (see National Socialism), Stoppard was educated in India and England. He worked as a journalist and as a writer for radio and television before coming into prominence with the production of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966. Conceived as a satirical meditation on Hamlet, by English playwright William Shakespeare, Stoppard's play focuses on the sadly existential but frivolous meanderings of two of Hamlet's marginal characters, a pair of quarrelsome courtiers.

Although sometimes criticized for the limited character development in his work, Stoppard used inventive linguistic displays and plot inversions to fuel the texts for his plays The Real Inspector Hound (1968), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977, with music by American pianist and composer André Previn), The Real Thing (1982), and Hapgood (1988). In addition, Stoppard adapted several foreign-language plays, and he wrote many radio scripts and motion-picture and television screenplays, including the motion-picture adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), which he also directed. His film script for Shakespeare in Love (1998) won an Academy Award for best original screenplay. He adapted the script for Enigma (2001) from a novel about the cracking of Germany’s Enigma code during World War II (1939-1945).

Stoppard’s interest in language and use of intellectual concepts remained apparent in his later plays. Arcadia (1993) uses modern concepts of randomness and complexity to examine the consequences for the present day of actions taken at a house party in 1809. Indian Ink (1995) looks at anglophilia among Americans and Indians amid discussions about the nature of art. The Invention of Love (1997) uses the vocabulary of textual analysis to imagine the inner life of English poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman. His ambitious trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (2002), chronicles the struggles of radicals in mid-19th century tsarist Russia. Rock 'n' Roll (2006) covers the years from 1968 to 1990 from two perspectives: anti-Communists in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Marxists in Cambridge, England. In 1997 Stoppard received a knighthood.