“Tom Stoppard” tells of a full life spent in motion

Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee (Alfred A. Knopf )

Czech-born Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard arrived in England with his family in 1946, when he was 8. They’d managed to flee Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis, and had spent years in Singapore and in India. He’d later call himself a “bounced Czech.”

Stoppard took to England, his adopted country. He was impressed with its values, especially free speech. He was as impressed by one of its sports: cricket.

He played in school (Stoppard skipped college) and, once he’d found success in the theater, on Harold Pinter’s team in London, the Gaieties. Their rival was a team from The Guardian newspaper. Pinter was an ogre on the pitch. He presided, Stoppard said, “like a 1930s master from a prep school.” Stoppard was the wicketkeeper, stylish in enormous bright red Slazenger gloves.

Stoppard is not an autobiographical playwright. But his obsession with cricket led to one of the great moments in his work. His play “The Real Thing” (1982) is about theater, relationships and politics — one character is an actress, another tries to help free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest. The play includes what’s become known as the cricket-bat speech, of which here is an excerpt:

“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly … (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.)”

The way the cricket bat taps a ball, and makes it sail an improbable distance, becomes, in Stoppard’s hands, a metaphor for writing. No living playwright has so regularly made that beautiful (clucks his tongue to make the noise) sound.

The adjective “Stoppardian” — to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. His plays are trees in which he climbs out, precariously, onto every limb. These trees are swaying. There’s electricity in the air, as before a summer thunderstorm.

Stoppard’s best-known plays include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia” and “The Coast of Utopia.” (His most recent, “Leopoldstadt,” is closed, for now, because of COVID-19.) He co-wrote the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love,” and has written or worked on dozens of other movie scripts. He’s written a novel and flurries of scripts for radio and television.

Now 83, he’s led an enormous life. In the astute and authoritative new biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man.

There’s been one previous biography of Stoppard, by Ira Nadel, published in 2002. Lee says that Stoppard “didn’t read it.” She must be taking his word.

Lee is an important biographer who has written of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15% of its body weight.

Lee owns a sharp spade, but don’t come here for dirt. Stoppard has long been a tabloid fixture in England; the spotlight on his relationships sometimes became a searchlight. But Lee makes the case that people, even his ex-wives, of which there are two, find him a decent sort.