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Sir Tom Stoppard OM is a British playwright, famous
for plays such as The Real Thing and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and for the screenplay for
Shakespeare in Love.
Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. He received an English education in India, to which his family had fled
to avoid the Japanese invasion of Singapore. His father was killed during this
exodus, and his mother married a British army major named Stoppard, who gave the boy his Anglo-Saxon surname. The family moved to
England.
Stoppard left school at seventeen and began work as a journalist. By 1960 he had
completed his first play A Walk on the Water, which was later produced as Enter a Free Man.
One of Stoppard's most famous works is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a comedic play which casts two minor
characters from Hamlet as its leads but with the same lack of power to affect
their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare's original. Hamlet's role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but
it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time
playing witty word games and pondering the hows, wheres, whys and whos of their predicament. It is similar in many ways to
Samuel Beckett's absurdist Waiting for Godot particularly in the main characters' lack of purpose and comprehension of their
situation.
Stoppard's plays are plays of ideas that deal with philosophical issues, yet he combines the philosophical ideas he presents
with verbal wit and visual humor. His linguistic complexity, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay, is a chief
characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple timelines.
Jumpers explores the field of academic philosophy, likening it to a
highly skilful competitive gymnastics display. Travesties is a parody of Oscar Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest. The Real Thing examines
the nature of love, and makes extensive use of 'play within a play'. Arcadia follows the fortunes of a pair of researchers investigating a literary mystery while
simultaneously showing what really happened during the incident they are investigating. Hapgood mixes the themes of
espionage and quantum
mechanics, especially exploring the idea that in both fields, observing an event changes the nature of the event.
By 1977, Stoppard had become concerned with human rights issues, in particular with the situation of political dissidents in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In February 1977, he visited Russia with a member
of Amnesty International. In June, Stoppard met Vladimir
Bukovsky in London and travelled to Czechoslovakia (then under communist control), where he met Václav Havel, at that time a dissident playwright. Stoppard became involved with Index On Censorship,
Amnesty International, and the Committee against Psychiatric Abuse and wrote various newspaper articles and letters about human
rights. Stoppard was also intrumental in translating Havel's works into English.
One of Stoppard's most unusual works is Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. It was written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg.
The play calls for a small cast, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an
essential part of the action. The play concerns a dissident under an oppressive regime (obviously meant to be taken for a Soviet
controlled state) who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, from which
he will not be released until he admits that his statements against the government were caused by a (non-existent) mental
disorder.
In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English
words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of
Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Cahoot's
Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg's Hamlet, and shows a performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret policeman who suspects the actors of subversion against the
state.
The Real Inspector Hound is one of his best-known short plays. In it two theatre critics are watching a ridiculous
send up of a Country House Murder Mystery, and become involved in the action by accident, causing a series of events that
parallel the play they are watching.
The Invention of Love (1997) investigates the life and death of Oxford poet
and classicist A. E. Housman, particularly dealing with his homosexuality.
Other plays include Night and Day, and Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976).
In his early years Stoppard wrote extensively for BBC radio, in many cases introducing a touch of surrealism. Some of his better known radio works include: If You're
Glad, I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, The Dog it was that Died, and Artist Descending a
Staircase, a story told by means of multiple levels of nested flashback. He returned to the medium for In the Native
State (1991), a story set both in colonial India and present-day England, and examines the relationship of the two
countries. Stoppard later expanded the work to become the stage play Indian Ink (1995).
Tom Stoppard has written extensively for film and television. Some of his better known scripts and adaptations include
Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and
Enigma. He has also adapted many of his own plays for film and TV, notably the 1990 production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the script of Brazil in 1985, and won one in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love. He is currently working on the script for
the upcoming His Dark Materials movie . He was appointed CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo group. He has been married twice, to Jose Ingle (1965-72), a nurse, and to Miriam Moore-Robinson, (1972-92), whom he left to begin a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal. He has two sons from each marriage.
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