SIR TOM STOPPARD

Profile: Sir Tom Stoppard By William LangleY

Can nothing stop them? Is there anything they can't do? They've mopped up the plumbing jobs, taken over the nation's nurseries, and are now writing clever plays about the places they used to call home. All those East Europeans may have travelled here in the search for betterment, but they don't forget where they have come from. Even if, as in the case of Sir Tom Stoppard, they can't remember what it was like.
Sir Tom's new play, Rock 'n' Roll, opening at the Royal Court this week, is largely set in Czechoslovakia, the now nonexistent country where he was born in 1937. It contemplates events between the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the collapse of Communism in 1989, but - this being Stoppard - ingeniously evokes the presence of Syd Barrett, the former Pink Floyd singer-songwriter, who, apparently as a consequence of taking too much LSD, now spends his days gazing at the walls of his semi-detached house in Cambridge.
Sir Tom can no longer speak Czech, and when he returned to his hometown of Zlin, a place of blameless obscurity once run by King Wenceslas's widow, he didn't recognise a brick of it. He remembers Syd well enough, though, and it isn't hard to sense what the playwright and the luckless Sixties rocker have in common. "All I ever wanted to do was play my guitar and jump around," said Syd in the days when he still spoke. "But people always got in the way."



They always got in Stoppard's way, too: shaping, stretching and browbeating him into the cricket-loving, faintly dandyish Englishman he had never intended to become. First there were the Nazis who, when he was still little Tomas Straussler, murdered half his family, and forced the remnants to flee to Singapore. Next came the Japanese Imperial Army, which, less than two years later, invaded Singapore, sending Tom's mother, Martha (his father stayed behind, and was never seen again), on a refugee boat to India with her two young sons.
Martha later married an English Army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, and for a while Tom led a pleasurable life as an adopted son of the Raj. But then came Independence, and a forced relocation to Britain.
He arrived here, aged nine, a tall, tanned boy with untutored hair, and for much of the time since we have been trying to work out who he is. Most conspicuously, he is "Clever Tom", a master of the swirl and dazzle of language, celebrated for the abundance and occasional indiscipline of his ideas, and famous for running off with Felicity Kendall.
Then there is "Modest Tom", who shrugs off serious appraisals and who once told the BBC interviewer John Tusa (also, bizarrely, born in Zlin): "What people tend to underestimate is my capacity for not bothering, not caring, not minding, not being interested. Er, it's pretty awful, actually. When I think about it, I sometimes think I really ought to do better."
There is "Romantic Tom", married first in 1965, to Jose Ingle, a nurse, who bore him two children and later said of him: "The hardest thing I've had to accept is that if I died or disappeared, he'd be upset, but in the end his life wouldn't be that different. Writing is the core of his existence." Then, in 1972, to Miriam Moore-Robinson, who achieved fame of her own as a television health expert and bore him two more children. They divorced in 1992, since when he has been linked to a number of women, most notably Ms Kendall.
And then, intriguingly, there is "Conservative Tom" - the bold exception to the arts world's monolithic Leftist orthodoxy, the admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and subtle baiter - most effectively in plays like Night and Day - of liberal vanities.
When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?" His liking for Lady Thatcher appears to have a theatrical as well as ideological dimension, for he saw in her radicalism the seeds of great drama. "In the period before the arrival of Mrs Thatcher," he once said, "politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that."
For all this, it might be fairer to call Stoppard a libertarian than a Conservative. In the 1970s, when the big names of British theatre - all of predictably uniform Leftist sympathies - reserved their denunciations for the United States and its supposedly nefarious doings in places like Nicaragua, Stoppard was quietly active among the dissident groups of the Eastern Bloc. In part this was attributable to his roots, but it speaks, equally, to the maturity of his thinking.
Who is he, though? In a famous 1977 New Yorker essay, Kenneth Tynan argued that the key to understanding Stoppard was never to forget that he was an émigré. By virtue of having no native land or mother tongue, reasoned Tynan, Stoppard had been freed from the cultural constraints that afflict other writers. The theory remains persuasive despite Stoppard's polite disavowal of it. A Stoppard play is a lightshow of shimmering language, multi-tiered ideas, intricate wit and outlandish characterisation. Where does it all come from? Not even Tom seems to know.
At 68, he is still discovering himself. When he was a boy, his mother drew a veil over the family's past. There had been a Jewish grandmother, she said, and this was why they had to leave Czechoslovakia. Only relatively recently did he learn the fully story.
His whole family was Jewish. Most of his relatives had been murdered in the death camps. His father, once the house doctor at the Bata shoe factory in Zlin, had been killed in a Japanese air raid. Some years ago, after a visit to Czechoslovakia, he wrote movingly of meeting an elderly woman, a former Bata employee, whose gashed hand had been stitched by Dr Straussler. "I touch it. In that moment, I am surprised by grief, a small catching up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing which came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar."
He went to boarding school in Yorkshire, but showed only limited aptitude for learning, and left at 17 to become a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol. He enjoyed the job, and later applied for a bigger one on the London Evening Standard. The editor, Charles Wintour, a chilly Fleet Street veteran, quizzed him sternly: "I gather you're interested in politics," said Wintour. "Who's the Home Secretary?"
"Look," blustered Stoppard, "I said I was interested, not obsessed."
A developing interest in drama came to his rescue, and by the early 1960s Stoppard was writing scripts for radio and television. His first stage success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was produced at the Edinburgh fringe festival and picked up by Tynan for the National Theatre. He hasn't looked back. Except to where he came from.