Life
Television review: Imagine… Tom Stoppard: A Charmed Life
His mother's trauma stifled the playwright's inner Jew
September 17, 2021 10:23
His mother's trauma stifled the playwright's inner Jew
September 17, 2021 10:23
Of the many questions Alan Yentob raises in Imagine’s new documentary profile of Tom Stoppard, one lingers unasked, yet permeates the whole; what makes someone a Jew? Family, history, faith? And what happens if all those elements have been removed from your life, is there anything that remains, some core quality that could then somehow be identified as being intrinsically Jewish?
Just the story alone of how Tomas Straussler became Tom Stoppard would be enough to make this a fascinating ninety minutes, a modern day Tarzan in reverse, a young child ship-wrecked from his own kind, growing to reach the pinnacle of his adopted society, even epitomising it. His family’s escape from the Nazis, their efforts to outrun the war in various outposts of the British Empire, their eventual settlement in the green and pleasant land of England with a new name, a new father, a new self; with another young writer that might’ve been their first play. Not so here, and for Alan Yentob and director Jill Nicholls, while they extricate the personal detail as we deftly zip through Tom Stoppard’s numerous works, they cleverly bring us full circle establishing connections and through lines to the themes that this person “not inclined to self- analysis and self-examination” finally explores in his latest work, himself.
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