Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard (1937- ), British dramatist and scriptwriter. Born Tom Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, he lived there and in India, before settling in England in 1946. After school in Nottingham and Yorkshire, he moved to Bristol where he worked as a journalist. He first came to prominence with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), which became an overnight success in London and, later, New York.

Written in the Theatre of the Absurd style, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead depicts the characters from Hamlet as spectators commenting on the main events of Shakespeare's play, and debating the question of free will while they have no choice but to play their doomed part. A sense of interleaving stories which pun on the nature of theatre (and raise parallel philosophical questions about the nature of reality) also informed his next success The Real Inspector Hound (1968), in which drama critics get drawn into the action of a play. Similarly, in The Real Thing (1982), the curtain lifts on a scene about marital infidelity which turns out to be from a play, while subsequent scenes portray the playwright's own relationships.

Stoppard's other plays, all of which display an amazing verbal dexterity, include After Magritte (1970); Jumpers (1972); the music-drama Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977); Arcadia (1993); Indian Ink (1995); The Invention of Love (1997), about the poet A. E. Housman; the ambitious Chekhovian trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), which chronicles the struggle of mid-19th century radicals in Tsarist Russia; and Rock 'n' Roll (2006), which premiered at London's Royal Court as part of the theatre's 50th-anniversary celebrations. He has also written a number of film scripts, notably Shakespeare in Love, which won the Best Screenplay Academy Award in 1999, and Enigma (2001), adapted from Robert Harris’ novel about the cracking of the Enigma code during World War II. He was made a CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997.