Hermione Lee undertook her lengthy life study of Tom Stoppard with his approval, if not encouragement. Unlike other accounts of Stoppard, including my own, her approach, while claiming independence, incorporates certain Stoppardian guidelines: be bright, be light, be right. The work, despite its length, largely succeeds because of its access to Stoppard's extensive archive, mostly at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) in Austin, TX, to people close to Stoppard throughout his entire career, and because of Lee's expertise in matching information to narrative. To be clear, Stoppard asked Lee to write his life and over several years participated in conversations and even reviewed the typescript for factual errors. To her credit, Lee admits (on the penultimate page of the biography) that this is not a definitive life and that there can be no such work. Her biography can do no more than capture “one aspect of him” (p. 864). Every biography, she knows, is incomplete.Opening with a Stoppard Family tree indicates the level of detail Lee provides offering background, as well as foreground, noted by grandchildren one of whom was born as recently as 2017. The text itself begins with the first things Stoppard might have remembered, creating a narrative role and presence for Stoppard from the opening sentence. He is not so much a subject as a participant in the story. This is a dramatic and effective role, in its way theatrical. It also offers a wide beginning since Lee addresses the fate of Czechoslovakian children at the outset of WWII, sent around the world, as were the Sträusslers, Stoppard's original family name, sent by the Bata shoe company to Singapore. The issue of his wavering Czech identity then becomes her subject, pointing out that Stoppard has not always favored that identity but that it was, in his word, “ineradicable,” as was his Jewishness, only discovered in the early 1990s. The introduction of the Jewish theme at the outset is important (p. 4).But Lee likes scenes and a great deal of the biography constructs them: when Stoppard's father Dr. Eugen Sträussler is told of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and the need for Jewish doctors of Bata Shoes to leave, she creates the moment the doctors gathered at the home of a Dr. Albert and learned the news. The doctor's wife was present and “she saw the doctors, all smoking, all sweating with fear” offering a kind of you-are-there scenario (p. 12). Lee then reconstructs the well-known scene of Stoppard visiting Kenneth Tynan to discuss the possibility of a National Theater production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The focus is on a good deal of stuttering and discussion of Tynan's yellow shirt. Another scenic moment is the brief meeting between Laurence Olivier and Stoppard, the young playwright telling Olivier how to play the Player King. OIivier did not pursue the role (pp. 143–44). Dialogue from fifty years ago is also reproduced with supposed dramatic authority (see p. 137), even with scenes that appear to enter Stoppard's mind: “he hated first nights. To encourage himself, he bought a new blue suit for the event [the opening of R &G]” (p. 149).There is even a theatrical structure to the biography with semi-dramatic cliffhangers as Lee moves from one section to another. Part one ends with the curtain going up on the National Theater's first night of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Part two ends with remarks on art, politics, and the independence of the artist as expressed in Travesties which foreshadow “plays soon to come about repression and censorship” (p. 295). Like Stoppard, Lee then quickly switches register to focus on jokes, music, and dancing, ending with the awkward locution that “a rabbit is magicked out of a hat” (p.295). Part three concludes with the drama of Stoppard finishing his work on Spielberg's Empire of the Sun script “just before his fiftieth birthday” (p. 453). Part four ends with a new change in his relationship to his past and sense of self with the September 1999 publication of his essay “On Turning Out to be Jewish” which revealed a surprising series of personal feelings as he started his new and biggest work, The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of no less than “revolution, exile, loss, hope, and change” (p. 639).More drama as part five, the final section of the biography, concludes with Stoppard's skepticism about biography, an attitude rampant throughout his plays with his most perceptive critique on the topic Oscar Wilde. In The Invention of Love, Wilde responds to a newspaper report concerning the inquest of a suicide that “‘it's only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination'” (Invention [FABER 1997]: pp. 95–96; Lee p. 861). In the final pages of her biography, Lee reveals Stoppard's own questionable attitude toward her project and her final effort at summing up which follows seems more a convention rather than a genuine effort to piece everything together (pp. 861–63). She senses that it's an impossible task. Nevertheless, her sense of an ending when writing about a living subject is incisive, as is her choice to leave the final words of her lengthy text to Stoppard alone.But imposing a dramatic structure upon the life, likely influenced by Stoppard's own plays, appears at times an enforced conceit, undermined by her repeated efforts to place Stoppard within a broader social, political and even international context. Yet distracting detail often interferes with this move: when he receives a knighthood at sixty, we learn the names of others in the arts also honored with Orders of Merit that year (p. 617). Does it matter? Is it essential to the narrative? Stoppard's accomplishments, she implies, seem to gain currency only in comparison to others. But contesting her expansive views is the often excessive detail as in the description of the medieval village of Lacoste and his house for what Lee mysterious calls his “hidden life” soon revealed as his lengthy affair with the actor Sinéad Cusak (pp. 624–25).The text repeatedly wavers between narrative progress and scenic stasis often controlled by a drive for information, a contest between “exposition and exhibition” (p. 477). Is it necessary, for example, to know the marriages and divorces of Sabrina Guinness's—she became his third wife in 2014—siblings, as well as her nieces and nephews (p. 790)? Or the type of stove Stoppard favored in his new home in Dorset with Sabrina (p. 797)? But for dramatic effect, certain details are compelling, no more so than when we learn the fate of his father's parents sent to Theresienstadt and then to their death in the ghetto at Riga, or the fate of Stoppard's extended family in the Holocaust, their names inscribed on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague (pp. 25, 635).Yet the style of the biography is often arch: “Stoppard leapt on these ideas with excitement and poured them into his play” (p. 554); “he was deeply pleased to be Sir Tom, though he never made a song and dance about it” (p. 617). The “suave editorial hand of Robert Silvers” improves his talk “Pragmatic Theater” when it appears in the New York Review of Books (p. 625). Stoppard was furthermore “keyed up as anyone” at the Oscars when Shakespeare In Love unexpectedly won best picture (p. 629), an achievement highlighted by such gossipy details as his agent Kenneth Ewing traveling from party to party in a limo with the Oscar “clutched between his legs” (p. 630). The writing can even be patronizing as in a reference to John Smith on sharing a typewriter with Stoppard at the Bristol Evening World in 1958: “that boy had gone far” (p. 630). Who offers the remark? Smith, Lee? Too often the rhetoric and language interfere with the thought: noting Stoppard's energetic activity in his mid-seventies and demands on his time, we learn that he was “greedy for quiet thinking time, at once private and famous” (p. 787). Friendships are “steadily and affectionately sustained” (p. 787).Lee also cannot pass up a good story. David Leveaux, director of a number of Stoppard's and Beckett's plays, was with Beckett in an East Berlin pub, when an eager fan interrupted them and told Beckett that he'd read his work for the past forty years. After a pause, a quizzical Beckett looked up and said “You must be very tired” (p. 631). The amusing incident distracts from Lee's fundamental narrative. Other moments seem pitched for a travel brochure: as Stoppard journeys by train from Prague to his childhood home, Zlín, we read that in the “deep, wooded river valley” that surrounds the town, houses were “climbing up the picturesque hilly slopes” (p. 635). For whom is this written?Throughout the text there is a persistent theatrical undertow—late in the volume Lee even refers to the page as “your stage of written words” (p.864)—buttressed by a constant, Stoppardian habit of chance and probability. But the effort to be dramatic underscores narrative gaps. Throughout, when uncertain of a particular act or event, “probably” appears, as when she postulates on the Sträussler's route as they traveled to Singapore, their first port of refuge when escaping Czechoslovakia (13). Later, there is slight confusion about how Stoppard met Miriam Moore Robinson, later to be Miriam Stoppard: did Miriam boldly introduce herself to Stoppard or did her then husband make the first move (p. 137)?Remarkably, there are few inaccuracies in such a long book. One of them, however, is Stoppard's sale of his archive not to the University of Austin, as noted on pages 527 and 973, but to the HRC at the University of Texas at Austin. And surprisingly, for all the importance of Stoppard's discovery of his Jewishness, the subject appears only in the indexical reference to his mother Marta on page 970. In the text, however, pp. 580–85 are key for the subject but Judaism or Jewishness does not appear as a separate Index entry. There are, however, eight references to his support of Soviet Jews (p. 974). And visually, Major Kenneth Stoppard appears only once, in a photograph where he is seated next to Marta and Stoppard on the young playwright's March 1965 wedding day. He looks to his right, away from the camera; both stepfather and stepson hold cigarettes.At the end of this textual journey from Czechoslovakia to Singapore to India and England, do we get inside Stoppard? The British drama critic Ivor Brown rephrased the question when he said of Noël Coward that we know what he does but do we know who he is? For Stoppard, the question remains unanswered. For the biographer, there are too many competing concerns to settle on one theme or style with the result a shifting pendulum between narrative detail and scene.1 But neither dominates the text and if one asks which is in control, the answer is Stoppardian: “probably both.”