Oxford Literary Festival 2008: The genius of Tom Stoppard
The winner of the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence had a disjointed upbringing that gave him a talent for unlikely associations. Peter Kemp sizes up a master of the surreal and cerebral.
Click to listen to Tom Stoppard at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Part One I Part Two
Theatre-lovers owe a big round of applause to the Bata Shoe Company. For it almost certainly saved Tom Stoppard’s life. As Hitler closed in on its homeland, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s, the firm moved its employees to safer parts of the globe. In 1939 one of its medical staff, Dr Straussler, and his wife, a company nurse, sailed to Singapore with their sons, Petr and Tomas. It was the start of a journey that took Tomas into a new identity and eventual celebrity as one of our most acclaimed playwrights.
It was also a nick-of-time escape, about whose urgency Stoppard was kept in the dark for more than 50 years. Only in 1993 did he learn about his Jewish origins and that his grandparents and three aunts perished in death camps. After his father died during the Japanese invasion of Singapore, his mother — who had fled to India with her boys — thought it more prudent that they remain ignorant of their background. Her remarriage in 1945 to Kenneth Stoppard, a British major, strongly reinforced this resolve.
An ill-tempered martinet bristling with bigotry, Major Stoppard lost no time, when the family settled in England, in anglicising his stepsons’ first names and changing their surname to his. Since loathing of “artiness” figured high among his prejudices, it was a move his younger stepson’s flamboyant theatrical career subsequently gave him ample cause to regret. Days after his wife died in 1996, he wrote to Tom Stoppard demanding that his surname be returned (with some restraint, Stoppard replied that reassuming the name of Straussler after half a century was “not practical”).
Theatre-lovers owe a big round of applause to the Bata Shoe Company. For it almost certainly saved Tom Stoppard’s life. As Hitler closed in on its homeland, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s, the firm moved its employees to safer parts of the globe. In 1939 one of its medical staff, Dr Straussler, and his wife, a company nurse, sailed to Singapore with their sons, Petr and Tomas. It was the start of a journey that took Tomas into a new identity and eventual celebrity as one of our most acclaimed playwrights.
It was also a nick-of-time escape, about whose urgency Stoppard was kept in the dark for more than 50 years. Only in 1993 did he learn about his Jewish origins and that his grandparents and three aunts perished in death camps. After his father died during the Japanese invasion of Singapore, his mother — who had fled to India with her boys — thought it more prudent that they remain ignorant of their background. Her remarriage in 1945 to Kenneth Stoppard, a British major, strongly reinforced this resolve.
An ill-tempered martinet bristling with bigotry, Major Stoppard lost no time, when the family settled in England, in anglicising his stepsons’ first names and changing their surname to his. Since loathing of “artiness” figured high among his prejudices, it was a move his younger stepson’s flamboyant theatrical career subsequently gave him ample cause to regret. Days after his wife died in 1996, he wrote to Tom Stoppard demanding that his surname be returned (with some restraint, Stoppard replied that reassuming the name of Straussler after half a century was “not practical”).
These early experiences gave Stoppard more than a new name. They also, by propelling him in quick succession through dramatically differing scenes, gave him a view of the world central to the plays that made his name. For Stoppard is theatre’s great juxtaposer. What strikes sparks in his imagination is the bravura bringing together of improbable associates. His first stage triumph, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), began as a verse-spoof called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear: zanily spatchcocking two Shakes-pearian tragedies, it had the emissaries from Elsinore crossing the mad monarch’s path when they disembarked at Dover. Since then, Stoppard has spent four decades scintillatingly bouncing antitheses off one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment