Tom Stoppard
Author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
About the Author
When the National Theatre needed a last-minute substitute for a canceled production of As You Like It, Kenneth Tynan decided to stage Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a work by an unfamiliar author that had received discouraging notices from provincial critics at its Edinburgh Festival debut. show more Of course, the play, when it opened in April 1967, met with universal acclaim. In New York the next year, it was chosen best play by the Drama Critics Circle. In such an unlikely way, Tom Stoppard came to light. Born in Czechoslovakia, a country he left (for Singapore) when he was an infant, he began his literary career as a journalist in Bristol, where play reviewing led to playwriting. After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard's reputation suffered through the production of a number of minor works, whose intellectual preoccupations were shrugged off by reviewers: Enter a Free Man (1968; "an adolescent twinge of a play," N.Y. Times), The Real Inspector Hound (1968; "lightweight," N.Y. Times), and After Magritte. But in the 1970s, the initial enthusiasms aroused by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were more than vindicated by the production of two full-length plays, Jumpers (1974) and the antiwar play Travesties (1975), whose immense verbal and theatrical inventiveness made them absolute successes on both sides of the Atlantic. Stoppard's method from the start has been to contrive explanations for highly unlikely encounters---of objects (the ironing board, old lady, and bowler hat of After Magritte), characters (Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara in Travesties), and even plays (Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Importance of Being Earnest, Travesties, and The Real Thing, 1982). In the 1970s, Tynan called for Stoppard---as a Czech and as an artist---to engage himself politically. But although political subjects have since found their way into pieces from Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977) to Squaring the Circle (1985), politics and art seem to have become just two more of the playwright's irreconcilables, which meet, but never join, in the logical frames of his comedy. The presence of political material---such as the Lenin sections that nearly ruin the second part of Travesties---has occasionally strained the structure of the plays. But in The Real Thing Stoppard is comfortable enough with the satire on art and activism to bring a third subject, love, into the mix. Stoppard has acknowledged his Eastern European heritage nonpolitically, in a series of adaptations of plays by Arthur Schnitzler (see Vol. 2), Johann Nestroy, and Ferenc Molnar. (Bowker Author Biography) Tom Stoppard is the author of many plays, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, and The Invention of Love. He lives in London. (Publisher Provided) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
(dut) The author was born as Tomas Straussler. After the death of his father, his mother married the Brittish Major Stoppard, and Tom since accepted his name.
Series
Works by Tom Stoppard
Where Are They Now? 4 copies
Galileo 3 copies
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead; Travesties; Jumpers; After Magritte; The real thing; The invention of love; The… (2002) 3 copies
The Hard Problem [theatre programme] — Contributor — 2 copies
The Dog It Was That Died 2 copies
'M' is for Moon Among Other Things 2 copies
Teeth 1 copy
Cahoot's Macbeth 1 copy
Dogg's Hamlet 1 copy
New-Found-Land 1 copy
Dirty Linen 1 copy
Neutral Ground 1 copy
Another Moon Called Earth 1 copy
Arcadia: Arena Stage 1 copy
TOPLU OYUNLARI 3 1 copy
Travesties [theatre programme] — Contributor — 1 copy
Tüm Oyunlarý II 1 copy
The Real Thing [programme] 1 copy
Toplu Oyunları 2: Aşkın İcadı / Akrobatlar / Hapgood / Merdivenden İnen Saantçı / Kasti Faul 1 copy
TOPLU OYUNLARI 1 1 copy
Associated Works
The Actor's Book of Contemporary Stage Monologues: More Than 150 Monologues from More Than 70 Playwrights (1987) — Contributor — 178 copies
Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100 (2011) — Contributor — 116 copies
The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books that Inspired Them (2015) — Contributor — 82 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Stoppard, Tom
- Legal name
- Sträussler, Tomáš (birth)
- Other names
- Boot, William
- Birthdate
- 1937-07-03
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Czechoslovakia
UK - Birthplace
- ZlÃn, Czechoslovakia
- Places of residence
- ZlÃn, Czechoslovakia (birth)
Singapore
Darjeeling, India
Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, UK
London, England, UK - Education
- Mount Hermon School
Dolphin School, Nottinghamshire, England, UK
Pocklington School, Yorkshire, England, UK - Occupations
- playwright
screenwriter
translator
journalist - Relationships
- Stoppard, Miriam (wife|divorced)
- Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (2000)
Western Daily Press (reporter ∙ critic)
Bristol Evening World (feature writer ∙ humor columnist ∙ drama critic)
BBC Radio
Standpoint
Shakespeare Schools Festival (show all 10)
Index on Censorship
Amnesty International
Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse
The London Library (president) - Awards and honors
- Order of Merit (2000)
Commander, Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (1978)
Knight Bachelor (1997)
Royal Society of Literature (1972)
PEN Pinter prize (2013)
David Cohen Prize (2017) (show all 20)
John Whiting Award
Honorary Fellow, British Academy (2017)
PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award (2015)
America Award in Literature (2017)
Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement (2013)
American Theater Hall of Fame (1999)
Honorary doctorate, Yale University (2000)
Honorary degree, Cambridge University (2000)
Honorary Patronage, University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin
The London Library (2002)
Tony Award (5x)
Laurence Olivier Award
Academy Award (1999)
Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award (2017) - Agent
- Anthony Jones (PFD)
- Short biography
- Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler to a Jewish family in ZlÃn, Czechoslovakia. With their parents Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company, and Martha Becková, he and his brother fled the country in 1939 to escape Nazi occupation. \The family went to Singapore, where Bata had a factory. Tom, his mother and brother fled to Australia in 1941. Tom spent three years in a boarding school in Darjeeling, India. In 1945, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard. Tom attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later Pocklington School in Yorkshire. He left school at age 17 and began working as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol. IHe also wrote short radio plays and in 1960, moved to London and launched himself as a playwright with A Walk on the Water, later re-titled Enter a Free Man.
- Disambiguation notice
- The author was born as Tomas Straussler. After the death of his father, his mother married the Brittish Major Stoppard, and Tom since accepted his name.
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 117
- Also by
- 22
- Members
- 21,222
- Popularity
- #1,021
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 270
- ISBNs
- 379
- Languages
- 13
- Favorited
- 114