Click to listen to Tom Stoppard at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Part One I Part Two

Theatre-lovers owe a big round of applause to the Bata Shoe Company. For it almost certainly saved Tom Stoppard’s life. As Hitler closed in on its homeland, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s, the firm moved its employees to safer parts of the globe. In 1939 one of its medical staff, Dr Straussler, and his wife, a company nurse, sailed to Singapore with their sons, Petr and Tomas. It was the start of a journey that took Tomas into a new identity and eventual celebrity as one of our most acclaimed playwrights.

It was also a nick-of-time escape, about whose urgency Stoppard was kept in the dark for more than 50 years. Only in 1993 did he learn about his Jewish origins and that his grandparents and three aunts perished in death camps. After his father died during the Japanese invasion of Singapore, his mother — who had fled to India with her boys — thought it more prudent that they remain ignorant of their background. Her remarriage in 1945 to Kenneth Stoppard, a British major, strongly reinforced this resolve.

An ill-tempered martinet bristling with bigotry, Major Stoppard lost no time, when the family settled in England, in anglicising his stepsons’ first names and changing their surname to his. Since loathing of “artiness” figured high among his prejudices, it was a move his younger stepson’s flamboyant theatrical career subsequently gave him ample cause to regret. Days after his wife died in 1996, he wrote to Tom Stoppard demanding that his surname be returned (with some restraint, Stoppard replied that reassuming the name of Straussler after half a century was “not practical”).

These early experiences gave Stoppard more than a new name. They also, by propelling him in quick succession through dramatically differing scenes, gave him a view of the world central to the plays that made his name. For Stoppard is theatre’s great juxtaposer. What strikes sparks in his imagination is the bravura bringing together of improbable associates. His first stage triumph, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), began as a verse-spoof called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear: zanily spatchcocking two Shakes-pearian tragedies, it had the emissaries from Elsinore crossing the mad monarch’s path when they disembarked at Dover. Since then, Stoppard has spent four decades scintillatingly bouncing antitheses off one another.

The Real Inspector Hound (1968) teasingly twitched away the barrier between audience and play so that two theatre critics end up, centre stage, as corpses amid the stock characters of the Agatha Christie-ish whodunnit they are reviewing. Jumpers (1972) exuberantly unleashed one of his drama’s most distinctive features: virtuoso interplay of the flippant and the cerebral. Acrobats jostled academics; musical comedy shared the stage with moral philosophy. Travesties (1974) continued this entangling of razzmatazz and rationality. In the Zurich of 1918 — where Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (the father of Dada) were co-refugees — surrealism and Soviet realism gaudily collide. Stoppard’s fascination with dual perspectives and alternative viewpoints is matched by his irrepressible taste for puns and doubles entendres, and his appetite for irony. Declaring that he’s usually in two minds about the ideas and ideologies his plays juggle with, he has said that the lines in English drama he finds most congenial are from Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions. At least I think I am.”

It’s no surprise that someone with such a penchant for insouciant, humane revelling in diversity should be acutely hostile to totalitarian efforts to impose tunnel-vision tyranny. Driven from his birthplace, Czechoslovakia, by one version of it, Nazism, Stoppard encountered another, Soviet communism, when he went back there in the 1970s. Television plays such as Professional Foul (1977), his inventive mix of philosophy and football, transmitted his angry disgust at this. So did his trilogy about the Russian revolution, The Coast of Utopia (2002), and his most recent play, Rock’n’Roll (2006), where a Velvet Underground-like band symbolises resistance to the regime.

Not only foreign dictatorship but British deterioration attracts disdain in Rock’n’Roll. “This place has lost its nerve. They put something in the water . . . It’s a democracy of obedience,” a Czech expatriate in 1990s Cambridge complains. It’s a sentiment that suggests a waning of the ardent Anglophilia that Stoppard has displayed for most of his life — an Anglophilia that was surely enough to warm even his step-father’s heart, you’d have thought. Cricket has been a passion, Vaughan Williams a favourite composer. With the proceeds from his plays he has collected English landscape watercolours, bought first editions of Austen and Dickens, and a Palladian mansion in Buckinghamshire. A similar country house, situated amid Capability Brown-designed grounds, provides the setting for his dazzling theatrical masterpiece, Arcadia (1993). Indian Ink (1995) mellowly harks back to the Raj. The Invention of Love (1997) glows with affection for Victorian Oxford and

Cambridge, and English eccentricity. Among his earliest writings were scripts for that 1950s acme of middle Englishness, the radio soap opera, Mrs Dale’s Diary.

Happily eclectic, Stoppard has always shunned high-culture earnestness. Jokey anachronisms pepper the screenplay he co-wrote for Shakespeare in Love (1998). His latest script was for The Bourne Ultimatum — an especially apt enterprise, it strikes you, for a man who, after losing his identity, has achieved spectacular success by high-octane, fast-witted flair.

STOPPARD ON STOPPARD

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