During lunch she drew him a family tree on whose branches were the names of relatives he had not known existed. They included three aunts on his mother’s side (plus the one he knew about who had survived the war). As he scanned the sketch he enquired about their fate. In each case the answer came in the form of just one word, the name of a Nazi concentration camp. It was “a moment when I understood for the first time that my mother had sisters who were murdered, not to mention her parents and my father’s parents”, Stoppard told me when we met in 2020.
26th August 1981: Czech born British playwright, Tom Stoppard wearing a T-shirt printed with a trompe l'oeil design resembling a waistcoat and tie. (Photo by Roy Jones/Evening Standard/Getty Images)Getty Images
Up until then he had known that his father Eugen Straussler, a doctor who worked for a manufacturer and was killed during a bombing raid during the war, was Jewish. But his mother Marta, who later remarried an Englishman called Kenneth Stoppard (who Tom has said was probably antisemitic) had always avoided the subject of Jewishness.
Twenty years later, the revelation from the family tree flared into what would become Stoppard’s final play, Leopoldstadt. It received its world premiere in London’s West End in 2020 and went on to win six Tonys in New York including Best Play. Set mainly in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna, the work centres on four generations of a Jewish Austrian family, one branch of which “married out”.
In the play’s devastating coda the character Leo, who was sent to England on the Kindertransport and like Stoppard was raised largely unaware of his Jewish heritage, is informed that he is in fact Jewish on both sides of his family. It is as devastating to read as it is to watch. Yet Stoppard resisted calling the play autobiographical. And certainly he does not appear in the play in the way he does in Night and Day (1978) which features a journalist (Stoppard’s writing career started as a journalist) or The Real Thing (1982) with its playwright.
The plays began a world away from Leopoldstadt with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential tragicomedy featuring bit-part characters drawn from Hamlet. When it opened in 1966 Stoppard arrived as a fully formed theatrical force displaying all the qualities that would later be described by the adjective Stoppardian.
“I’d hate to define the word myself,” he said when I asked him what it meant to him. “Making people collide,” he offered. “That is people who are known for different things projected by a fiction or fantasy into the same story.”
This is a fair description of his 1993 masterpiece Arcadia, which is set in two different centuries in the same Derbyshire country house. It is a play in which Stoppard abuts Classicism with Romanticism, art with nature and the 19th and 20th centuries, often all at the same time. Yet the adjective Stoppardian normally means something more than characters. It is a heady mix of thrillingly articulate dialogue, Wildean wit and, crucially, mind-expanding ideas.
In 2015 while I was researching a profile of the playwright ahead of the opening of his penultimate work The Hard Problem, which is about human consciousness, I spoke to Antony Sher about the challenge of conveying Stoppard’s daunting themes as an actor.
Sher had played the role of the misremembering British diplomat Henry Carr in the 1993 RSC revival of Stoppard’s Travesties. When we spoke he was in the middle of a run playing Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV (also for the RSC). He suggested we talk in his dressing room as prepared for that evening’s performance.
“I remember seeing the original production of Travesties with John Wood playing Henry Carr,” he said while climbing into his Falstaff fat suit. “I also remember not understanding it and feeling stupid. Then when I was offered the role and read it I thought it was fantastic. It’s the same challenge with Shakespeare. People fear Shakespeare will be difficult to understand but our job as actors is to take those worries away and communicate the meaning. Stoppard, Shakespeare – it’s the same.”
Sher was reflecting the widely held view that Stoppard’s plays stimulate the intellect rather than the heart. Yet this is to overlook the heartrending poignancy of plays that combine complexity and humanity, such as Arcadia, for instance, which not only expounds on such such complex subjects as chaos theory and the unknowable forces of history, but does so while conveying the fragility of the human condition.
3D79P3X l-r: Ed Stoppard (Valentine Coverly), Dan Stevens (Septimus Hodge), Samantha Bond (Hannah Jarvis) in ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard at the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2 04/06/2009 set design: Hildegard Bechtler costumes: Amy Roberts lighting: Paul Anderson director: David LeveauxAlamy Stock Photo
Meanwhile, The Invention of Love (1997), which imagines the poet AE Housman at the age of 77 encountering his younger self – “I’m not as young as I was. Whereas you of course, are” – is no emotional desert. Even less so The Real Thing (1982) in which playwright Henry articulates the nature of love.
“I love love,” he says, “I love having a lover and being one. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn’t a lover.”
Stoppard was 77, the same age as his Housman, when The Hard Problem opened at the National, Nicholas Hytner’s final production as artistic director there.
Perhaps one day an ambitious dramatist will attempt a play about Stoppard in which the playwright meets his younger self, just as his Housman did.
Such a play might explore Stoppard’s writer’s block, which Stoppard himself explored in his Oscar-winning film Shakespeare In Love.
The play might also touch on his “overpaid” work for Hollywood as an uncredited script doctor on blockbusters such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones; it might dwell for a moment on the screenplay job that in retrospect one can now see was the first foray into territory he had no idea he would explore more fully in his final play nearly three decades later.
It happened in the early 1990s when Steven Spielberg called Stoppard for help with a scene he was filing for Schindler’s List. Stoppard was in the shower but took the call anyway. The solution he gave Spielberg while naked and dripping solved Spielberg’s problem and ended up in the film. Such a play might see our Stoppard getting dry and dressed after the Spielberg phone call and, just as Stoppard plays sometimes do, collapsing time to a much older version of Stoppard in his early eighties. Then in the play he is writing a speech for Leo the character in Leopoldstadt who most closely resembles himself.
Leo’s speech finishes with a list of the Nazi camps in which his family died, just as Stoppard’s new-found Jewish relative had listed the camps that killed Stoppard’s Czech family. But please don’t end the play there. A play about Stoppard must finish on the thrilling, soaring intellectual and, yes, emotional that his plays gave audiences, and will continue to give.
