Who is Tom Stoppard?
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-
Our perception of him as a faintly heartless intellectual gymnast largely derives from the initial productions of his work. But David Leveaux’s brilliant revival of this 1982 play taps into the genuine core of feeling in his work: Stoppard is really a romantic who uses cerebration as a shield against emotional excess. The beauty of this play is that it combines structural intricacy with pain and passion. Its hero, Henry, is a sardonically clever dramatist, who adulterously falls for an actress, Annie, and marries her. She then deceives him with a young actor during a gig in Glasgow. But whereas in the kind of adultery-comedy Henry writes people camouflage their emotional wounds with smart remarks, in life they are pole-axed by grief. Among many other things, the play offers a sentimental education in which Henry learns the gift of inarticulacy. But, this being Stoppard, there is a philosophical core to the excavation of pain. What, it constantly asks, is the real thing? Is it married l
