Tom Stoppard Assesses the Cost of His Charmed Life

n the day of his mother’s funeral in 1996, the playwright Tom Stoppard had a little spat with his stepfather Kenneth, the man who married his widowed mother in India and took her and her two young sons back with him to the U.K. “It was like the hour my mother died and we came home from the hospital and he was very upset and he didn’t entirely approve of things I was involved in—Jewish questions—and he just blurted out that I should stop using his name.

The familiar Holocaust narrative is made compelling because it is Stoppard’s most overtly biographical play, although the Stoppard-like character is only a bit part. It began to germinate in the former Tomas Straussler’s mind after the demise of communism loosened travel restrictions, allowing some relatives to visit from Czechoslovakia, where he was born.

Now 85, Stoppard counts himself as blessed, an actual word he uses. He still has the energy and acuity to write five-act plays that touch on as wide a range of subjects as the history of number theory, the Hapsburg empire and the early days of Freud. He’s married, for the third time, to Sabrina Guinness of the beer family, although he’s careful to dispel any notions of a family fortune. His family seems as intact as a third-wife family can be.

Tom Stoppard gave us, among the others, Parade's end, so I'll be forever grateful 🤍

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