Tom Stoppard in Conversation

by Tom Stoppard

British playwright Tom Stoppard in his own words

328 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

This collection of Tom Stoppard interviews, spanning the years 1967 through 1993, gave me profound insight into the playwright's seemingly endless profusion of transsexual characters. Underneath all those layers, at the core of the writer, I'm convinced there's a vagina.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I read it through, albeit skimming a bit. Stoppard is someone I've long felt I should get to know (his stuff I mean) but it might have made sense to have seen/heard more of his plays before reading this extensive collection of interviews. Given his reputation as a shimmering intellect I thought it might be interesting enough in its own right, and I can't really complain because it wasn't.
He does seem fairly interesting and reasonably bright, though there is nothing in here that really demonstrates the genius that's constantly mentioned.

What's in it? About 3 dozen interviews, from newspapers, magazines and in a couple of cases relatively specialist drama journals. They get a bit repetitive. It's mildly interesting to note how often the same bons mots get recycled, both by his interviewers and by Stoppard himself.

I'm not passing a negative judgment on the book, just a mild warning that you may not get a fantastically huge amount of joy out of it unless you are already pretty well versed in and keen on Stoppard's work.

One final passing comment - there is a fair bit of material scattered through on Stoppard's experience of and take on the craft of play writing and production, which I did find interesting.