Sir Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, died at his home in Dorset today aged 88. In 2019, he gave a rare in-depth interview to Douglas Murray.

Sir Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, died at his home in Dorset today aged 88. In 2019, he gave a rare in-depth interview to Douglas Murray.

Sir Tom Stoppard is Britain’s – perhaps the world’s – leading playwright. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his family left as the German army moved in. The Strausslers were Jewish. In adulthood he learned that all four of his grandparents were killed by the Nazis. His father was killed by the Japanese on a boat out of Singapore as he tried to rejoin his wife and two sons. In India his mother married again, to an English Army man who gave his stepchildren his surname.

Stoppard has lifted the lid on his early life only once before, in a piece for Talk magazine in 1999. He remarked there that in the 1990s, after the death of his mother, his stepfather had asked him to stop using his name after feeling some imagined ingratitude in his then already famous stepson: ‘Don’t you realise I made you British?’ seemed to be his resentful message.

Today, at the age of 82, the playwright lives in an old rectory in the south of England with his third wife, Sabrina Guinness, whom he married in 2014. After lunch together in the kitchen and a walk around the rectory gardens, the famously private author agrees to talk about his life and work, including his new play, Leopoldstadt, which opens at the end of January.

We talk in the drawing room, with a log fire roaring beside us. With his still unmistakable Mitteleuropean drawl he explains that the right subject for a play ‘is not that easy to find’. Perhaps it is only now, towards the end, that Stoppard feels ready to go back to the world which produced him?

‘This one actually was hiding in plain sight. I’d been circling it for quite a long time without quite admitting that I was writing a play about it. It’s a Jewish family – 1900 to 1955–— and the main reason that they’re Viennese is that the latter part of the play impinges on my own experience, this mental experience, and I didn’t want it to be about me because it wasn’t supposed to be about me. But it was about… yes it was about part of myself.’

He speaks slowly, carefully, constantly turning over and self-correcting his words as he caresses and then smokes the first of a steady stream of cigarettes. ‘But it was so much more than that. It would have been confusing if I’d said, “Well here’s this young man — or old man — born in Zlin in 1937”, and so forth. So to get away from all of that I made them Viennese, which was all well and good up to a point and then, when it began to kind of cross the frontier into something more individually personal I had to shift my feet because I came to England when I was eight and ultimately this play ends up with somebody who was a bit older than me and came to England speaking only German, whereas I spoke English by the time I came to England. So there’s just a scrap of me towards the end of the play.’

The subject of Jewish culture in the middle of Europe just before the catastrophe may be the most fertile subject there is.

‘I feel that way about it myself now, yes. You honestly can’t do justice to it. There couldn’t have been many places or periods where the axis between culture and its practitioners and its audiences was so intimate and so intense.’

Does he have pre-opening angst?

‘Just the technical and physical aspect of things. When you’re writing you’re very self-sufficient. It doesn’t need anything except you and it. But the moment it goes into rehearsal, and especially on to the stage itself, it becomes an aggregator.’

Do the words still come as easily? ‘All the good bits are subconscious — they truly are. It’s one of those things maybe writers like to say of themselves or say of their trade, but it’s very seldom that you sit down knowing pretty much what you have to put on this page of paper. It’s much more the case that it creates itself in the doing, almost as though it creates itself in the physical act of writing.’

There is a quote from the 19th century Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky, who features in Stoppard’s 2002 trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia — essentially, where does the poet go at that moment of pause, before his pen starts up again?

‘I know more than is good for me now about synapses and lobes and grey matter and that whole stuff that I got to know about quite thoroughly for The Hard Problem [his 2015 play about the problem of consciousness]. So I imagine that, in a sort of sense, I know what happens materially. But as far as the immaterial part of it goes, not........

© The Spectator