Interview with Tom Stoppard and Dame Hermione Lee about their biography of him

Dame Hermione Lee has earned an excellent reputation as the author of biographies of great women writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. For her, biography is autopsy and portrait at the same time – she dissects the author in order to tell the most precise life story possible, but also brings the subject to life by bringing warmth, color and emotion into the image. She describes her previous subjects as “certainly dead” – and therefore unable to answer.

So what happens when you’re asked to write a biography about someone very much alive – Sir Tom Stoppard, arguably Britain’s most renowned living playwright? Theatergoers have seen his work on stage for more than half a century, from breakthrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966 to his current triumph in New York, Leopoldstadt.

In addition to his successful plays, Stoppard has written a novel and numerous stage and film adaptations, including the Oscar-winning one Shakespeare in love. Later in life, Stoppard was also known for an extraordinary life story — a Jewish family that left Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, briefly took refuge in Singapore before the arrival of the Japanese, and then suffered separation, the death of his father, and an unexpected chance for one new life in Britain.

Dame Hermione’s biography by Stoppard, released in 2020, has been called strict and loving. The portrait is perhaps best captured in a quote from fellow playwright Simon Gray. “It’s actually one of Tom’s accomplishments,” says Gray, “that he’s not envied for anything except maybe his looks, his talents, his money and his luck.”

On a short holiday in London, I met up with Dame Hermione and Sir Tom on a gray winter’s afternoon in Notting Hill to discuss the biography. A film crew hovered nearby, capturing the conversation for the upcoming Adelaide Writers Festival.

Dame Hermione recalled an assignment that began in 2014 when she and Sir Tom agreed to work together on an authorized life.

“Well, I was – and still am – a very reticent person,” he says, “and was quite reticent about having a biographer. But a biographer or two had been threatening, so to speak, and I knew Hermione… I thought, well, I’ll have my life written. I would much rather it had been written by her.”

But his caution persisted for some time. Sir Tom did not immediately reveal the diaries he kept at various points in his life – and an extraordinary collection of letters written to Marta Becková, his mother.

“My mother kept a lot of my letters,” Sir Tom recalls. “From boarding school I was a conscientious letter writer. At first I just thought my reputation would never outlive my school kid letters. But eventually I just stopped caring and I asked my secretary to…read her and ask is there anything relevant here? And she made it part of the way before I decided, to hell with that.”

Dame Hermione says: “It’s quite extraordinary for a biographer to look at this kind of approach”. Sir Tom had started writing weekly since 1948 and stopped in 1996, the year Marta died.

“Of course you don’t tell her everything because she’s your mother,” he notes. “But you clearly wanted her to feel like she knew what you were doing.”

Writing the biography took six years. Dame Hermione, a distinguished literary scholar, traced the work and its interaction with life, from early comedy successes to plays exploring the fate of Eastern Bloc artists such as Rock’n’RollInfidelity in the theater class in The real thingand idea games – all about the chaos theory in arcadia and consciousness inside The difficult problem.

Then, late in his career, several long and ambitious works – The Invention of Love 1997 about the classic and poet AE Housman, the 2002 trilogy The Coast of Utopia about Russian revolutionaries in the 19th century and Leopoldstadthis 2020 inquiry into a Jewish family and the Holocaust.

Unfortunately none of these later works were performed in Australia. Logistics conspired against local productions. Leopoldstadt requires 41 actors, a large stage, and a director and cast capable of simultaneously conveying to several overlapping generations, from the intellectual ferment of late 19th-century Vienna to the horrors of the Nazi era.

The piece is a remarkable late work – the author was approaching 84 when it premiered. It has proven to be an exceptional hit in New York, with long waiting lists for tickets and numerous accolades, including several Olivier Awards.

The focus of the critical discussion was speculation about the little boy who comes on stage in the final minutes in 1955. Rescued from danger shortly before the Nazi conquest of Austria, this character returns as a smug English patriot, oblivious to the loss of his extended family. Amidst the debris of the Holocaust, he is told that it is important to remember – those who live without history cast no shadow.

Is this Sir Tom writing about himself, the boy who only later in life learned the full fate of his extended family? Lady Hermione was preparing for Leopoldstadtand as she watched the play take shape, she realized there was something deeply autobiographical about that moment.

Sir Tom denied it when asked.

“No, for heaven’s sake, it’s about a Viennese mathematician,” he told her.

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But she wasn’t fooled. As the cast reached the end of the first full run, “there was not a dry eye in the rehearsal room,” she recalls. And the writer asked the cast, “Is it okay for me to cry over my own play?”

Sir Tom is visibly moved as he recalls this moment. “Did I say that?” he asks, already knowing the moment.

We close with a quote from legendary producer – and Sir Tom’s close friend – Mike Nicols, who describes Stoppard as the rarest of creatures: a writer who is happy.

Sir Tom smiles at the memory. “It’s nice to have said that about you. But I honestly think I’ve had my fair or unfair share of miserable times and anxieties.” He suggests that everyone is a combination of “a very happy person and a very anxious person.” We are all a bit of both.”

Dame Hermione interviewed many of Sir Tom’s friends and colleagues for the biography and says some identified with him because they felt a “kind of darkness” or sadness in his character.

“So it depends who you ask,” she says.

“And perhaps,” suggests Sir Tom, “every statement is partly true.”

It’s a fitting conclusion from a playwright known for looking at a problem from many angles and rejecting simple explanations for layers of complexity. A man now burdened with knowledge that does not burden his younger self, who no longer calls himself happy, yet lives amidst success and fame. An artist who is still wary of revealing too much about himself, even when we talk about his 900-page bio.

Glyn Davis is Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet of Australia. His interview with Dame Hermione Lee and Sir Tom Stoppard will open Adelaide Writers Week on March 2nd and be screened at the State Library of Victoria on March 7th, following a conversation between British playwright David Hare and Australian author Don Watson for An Evening with the Playwrights. adelaidefestival.com.au; slv.vic.gov.au