Tom Stoppard has died at 88 as the pre-eminent English playwright of the last half century. He leaves behind a remarkable body of theatrical work, characterised by his playfulness with the English language and his serious engagement with ideas of identity and liberty. These came to emerge as increasingly central themes in his work, perhaps because they had defined the life that he was able to lead.
For he had been born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin in Moravia, before becoming a triply displaced refugee boy. Having been taken to Singapore as a two-year-old, two days before the Nazis invaded, he was to speak his first words, in Czech, in East Asia, but was soon to forget his mother tongue. Aged four he was again on a boat, this time to Bombay, two days before Singapore fell to the Japanese. So many of his earliest memories were of Darjeeling, in British India, where his mother met Major Kenneth Stoppard, marrying him in Calcutta, before they traveled to Southampton and then Derbyshire, where the young brothers Petr and Tomas became anglicised as Peter and Tom Stoppard. His mother and his father wanted him to be fully assimilated, with different motives for believing in never speaking again of the past.
“At the age of eight, I fell in love with England, almost at first sight,” he was to say. Having narrowly escaped Hitler and the Japanese, he had also missed the partition of India and life behind the iron curtain. Stoppard thought of himself as having been dealt a lucky hand. Yet his shifting ideas over his lifetime about his own identity and heritage illuminate both competing and evolving ideas about what it means to be English and British – and perhaps how much integration should and should not demand of us too.
It had been Stoppard’s epigrammatic wit that appealed to me on first encountering his work. I recall seeing the 1993 Barbican revival of Travesties, while an undergraduate student, with its absurd unreliable rhyming account of the imagined encounters of James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadist poet Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917.“I am with you on the free press; it’s the newspapers I can’t stand,” as Henry says in The Real Thing. Stoppard declared that part of the attraction of theatrical dialogue was that it was an art form that could best embrace contradiction. I recall picking up the text of his acclaimed Arcadia after leaving the theatre, having found its themes of architecture, the Enlightenment and chaos theory dizzyingly tricky to keep up with on first viewing.
After the breakthrough success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Edinburgh fringe in the mid-1960s, Stoppard had declared himself to be a “playwright without causes”. Yet that turned out to be decreasingly true.
As a football-mad student of politics and philosophy, I especially enjoyed his relatively minor work Professional Foul. Broadcast by the BBC, it almost seemed to blend the spirit of Monty Python and Harold Pinter, taking a sketch idea of mixing up philosophy and football commentary when a group of academics and England players find themselves in the same hotel lift in Prague. The situation is extended into a study of the ethics of free speech and espionage behind the iron curtain.
Freedom of expression became his cause. He thought of himself mainly as an English ally of Czech democrats and dissidents, declaring that he felt no more particular partiality to their cause than that of their Hungarian, Polish or East German counterpart. “I knew I was – used to be – Czech, but I didn’t feel Czech,” he said of his support for Charter ‘77. Yet he had rediscovered his sense of connection by the time his Rock and Roll at the Royal Court in 2006 told the story of the Czech democratic underground, from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution, even declaring a sense of patriotic pride in the Czech flag.
It does tend to be rarer for migrants to identify as English as well as British than for their children and grandchildren to do so. Stoppard’s story illuminates the common-sense point that it is easier for those who arrive at eight, rather than eighteen or twenty-eight. But the evident Englishness of Tom Stoppard, in his life and work, illustrate the absurdity of those, like former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who suggest that Englishness is only attainable after five or six generations.
Stoppard would, however, often to joke about himself as a ‘Bounced Czech’ and an ‘honorary Englishman’, saying that “I fairly often find I’m with people who forget I don’t quite belong in the world we’re in”.
On turning out to be Jewish is Stoppard’s compelling account of rediscovering his family history in the mid-1990s, discussing why his mother did not tell her sons about their past. “As I understand it, if l do, ‘being Jewish’ didn’t figure in her life until it disrupted it and then it set her on a course of displacement, chaos, bereavement, and – finally – sanctuary in a foreign country, England, thankful at least that her boys were now safe. Hitler made her Jewish in 1939,” he writes.
“Remember I made you British,” Major Kenneth had told his nine-year-old stepson. Half a century later, in the Autumn of 1996, he was aghast at his stepson’s ‘tribalisation’ and support for the Jews, finding in it an ingratitude that insulted Britain. “He asked me to stop using Stoppard as my name. I wrote back that this was not practical,” said the playwright, who was knighted as Sir Tom Stoppard by Queen Elizabeth II the following year.
It may be a paradox if Leopoldstadt, his final play, were to become his defining work. This realistic account of Jewish Vienna from the 1890s through the holocaust – his belated reckoning with his hidden roots – could be seen as both the most biographical yet least Stoppardian of his plays.
In the final act of his final play, a scene set a decade after the war in 1955, Stoppard offers us a caricature of his English self. Only three of the family have survived the death camps. Leopold Rosenbaum, having escaped as an eight-year-old to England, has become Leo Chamberlain, a fully Anglicised young man, lover of cricket and successful writer of short, funny books. He does not remember his Viennese childhood and is only now being made aware of the tragedy of his family’s history. The audience is invited to laugh at Leo’s callow declaration that he is “proud to be British, to belong to a nation which is looked up to for…you know…fair play and parliament and freedom of everything, asylum for exiles and refugees, the Royal Navy, the royal family…oh, I forgot Shakespeare.”
“You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you,” his cousin Nathan, the one family member to survive Auschwitz, tells him. They invoke together the names and places of the family members lost – “Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Dachau. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz”. The epilogue makes Stoppard’s play an act not just of reconnection but of atonement and reparation for his belated discovery of his family history.
Tom Stoppard’s life and work was founded in that story of escape, sanctuary and security, of luck and the liberty to bear witness. He was grateful to the country which gave him the opportunity to lead a life with the freedom to imagine, create and write. He supported those who sought such freedoms elsewhere.
Stoppard’s life and work captures a positive story about Britain – of the value of a country which has believed it is possible to become British and to fall in love with England. Our great traditions of language and literature have often heard the voices of incomers write new chapters into the shared cultural canon of a nation.
Stoppard’s own contribution illustrates the foundational importance of welcoming integration. Yet his journey of identity captures too why integration, in a liberal democracy, need not suppress the ability to breathe out and tell the whole complex story of how we became the people that we are today.
