‘I aspire to write for posterity’: An interview with Tom Stoppard

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.