Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard: A Life is a massive compendium of information that will become not simply a valuable but a necessary resource for Stoppard scholars. Proceeding chronologically, and armed with the results of extensive research and interviews, Lee covers every dimension of Stoppard’s personal and professional lives: his birth as Tomas (or Tomik) Straussler in Czechoslovakia, followed by living as a refugee in Singapore and India before he arrived in England at age nine; his schooling; his writing and social lives while a journalist in Bristol; the origins of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; the major and less major plays throughout his long career; his self-presentation as a “bounced Czech” in undying gratitude to the country that took him in; his marriages, romances and affairs, and family life; his friendships and professional relationships; the financial rewards he earned and his financial burdens; the active role he takes in casting and rehearsing productions of his plays; the revisions he made to the plays in rehearsal; his thoughts on the vagaries of playwrighting and the odd contingencies of translating scripts from page to stage; his work in adapting and translating foreign-language plays, and in radio drama, TV, and film; his (perhaps belated) 1993 discovery of his Jewish roots and family members murdered in the Holocaust; his work on behalf of organizations such as the London Library and the National Theatre, as well as his efforts to aid Soviet refuseniks, Vaclav Havel, and the Belarus Free Theatre; and the continuing presence of his plays as revived and reinterpreted on British and American stages.Lee offers numerous amusing anecdotes (Stoppard’s habit of taping striking paper to his desk so he could spend less time firing up his next cigarette) and, as would be expected, instances of Stoppard’s wit. While she quotes his own utterances about the unreliability or falsity of any biography throughout the book, she sets out connections between the life and work (such as The Real Thing overlapping with the breakdown of Stoppard’s relationship with his second wife, Miriam Stern, and Hapgood’s themes of doubles and duality arising from his own life story), but she does not overstress these linkages. To add interpretive context, Lee uses comparisons to Harold Pinter and David Hare, writers personally connected to Stoppard (in different ways). Lee thoroughly documents the warm and lasting friendship between Pinter and Stoppard, while using Pinter’s political theatre and activities as a counter to Stoppard’s involvements with politics and history. Lee also extensively interviewed Stoppard’s longtime frenemy David Hare, who becomes a representative spokesperson for leftist or socialist critiques of Stoppard.Lee makes a significant contribution to the scholarly criticism by detailing Stoppard’s discovery of his Jewish ancestry: until the early 1990s, Stoppard knew nothing about his Czech ancestors, learning only then that his birth family was Jewish on both sides and that his grandparents and three of his aunts died in the Holocaust. Lee’s final chapter details how Stoppard was inspired to write Leopoldstadt, a time-shifting, allusive play about an assimilationist Jewish family in Vienna, before and after the Holocaust, with a character who, similarly to himself, was given refuge in England and has almost fully repressed awareness of his past. This rather moving chapter allows Lee to round out the shape of Stoppard’s life and career in terms of his own recognition of fate, chance, and loss in human affairs.If this biography is both authoritative and necessary, the experience of reading it is sometimes far from exciting. Lee never convinced Stoppard, by all accounts a man given to privacy, to talk about what the various moments of his life felt like as he lived through them. She notes that Stoppard gave her access to his friends, his appointment diaries, and his letters to his mother, but it’s easy to see how a biography heavily dependent on such materials may lack intimacy and depth. While Lee had a number of conversations with Stoppard, she never quotes his words in the book; instead, she (apparently) paraphrases him in a novelistic indirect discourse, making many moments in the book seem vague. For instance, recounting Stoppard’s changing views on the “luckiness” of his life, Lee writes, “He reproached himself for having trotted out his line so often over the years, of having had a charmed life” (735). Lee’s diction makes it impossible to know how extensive or agonizingly self-critical this recognition really was. Elsewhere, Lee admits she could not lift her subject’s self-protective barriers: “Somewhere in that time [while writing and rehearsing The Real Thing], he would say he ‘got upset about something.’ But that ‘something’ was not anything he would tell his biographer” (360). Lee’s honesty is refreshing, but her failure to delve disappoints readers hoping to learn previously unknown specifics.Of course, somewhat ironically, the shape of Stoppard’s career itself may tend to dampen a reader’s interest: while the sections on Stoppard’s youth and his days as a journalist offer excitement, that wanes after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern makes him a star by age twenty-nine. After we get to the opening of R + G, over six hundred pages remain. Notes of banality and complacency creep into such sentences as “he was extremely pleased to be asked to do the screenplay of John Le Carre’s The Russia House” (435) and “in May 2000, to his great delight, he was awarded the Order of Merit, one of the highest honors in Britain, limited to twenty-four very distinguished people at any time, chosen by the Queen” (563), and there are a number of perhaps overly detailed lines about real estate: the house Stoppard bought with Sabrina Guinness “was a Grade II listed 1790s house. . . . The outside walls were made of ‘banded flint and ashlar,’ which gave the house a black-and-white stripey effect” (693).Stoppard’s behavior, character, decisions, work, relationships are described consistently in positive, admiring terms, perhaps in response to the recent biographical trend of portraying writers’ lives warts and all, or maybe only the warts. Either Stoppard is exactly as wonderful a human being as Lee makes him out to be, or this biography tends to hagiography. In fact, Lee mentions that upon reading the book, Stoppard noted that “he is good at performing niceness, but he is not as nice as some people think” (752). On page 752 of a 754-page book, Lee devotes part of a paragraph to a few unnamed people skeptical of Stoppard’s benevolence—but that is the definition of too little, too late. Also, Lee’s phrasings sometimes work to absolve or minimize what could otherwise be phrased as much nearer to clear criticism. For instance, when discussing the devolution of Stoppard’s second marriage, she writes of how Stoppard “confided [to friends] his difficulties with Miriam’s intense involvement with her work” (380). Would it not have been possible for Lee to note forthrightly that one of the factors in this divorce was Stoppard’s (presumably agonized) jealousy over his wife’s success, renown, and dedication? In discussing the reception of The Coast of Utopia, Lee writes, “There was some right-wing appropriation of his arguments” (599), a sentence the English might call po-faced, as it ignores that the play makes it very easy indeed for its ideas to be assimilated into larger structures of conservative belief.Readers may be surprised to learn how much time Stoppard spent on TV and film projects (as well as other activities that Lee describes accurately as distractions). Not all of these are defensible on the grounds of artistic integrity or vision. While Stoppard worked on film adaptations of worthy material such as John Le Carre’s The Russia House and J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, other screenplays he contributed to, with or without an official writing credit, include Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (from which Lee quotes admiringly), Mom, Poodle Springs, Beethoven (yes, the one about the big dog), Sleepy Hollow, and 102 Dalmatians. This list is hard to square with the claim that Stoppard would never work on “any old screenplay” simply for the money (429). Lee documents precisely how lucrative such writing was while sympathetically noting, “He often found this kind of work frustrating, burdensome, and time wasting, especially if it cut across play-writing” (430)—true enough, but it’s not as if it wasn’t his choice to do one thing versus another. Even granting Stoppard’s point that “there’s a difference between completely wasted time and time which would have been better spent” (430), learning that Stoppard expresses pride in inventing a line for Keira Knightley on the set of Anna Karenina is a little dismaying.Lee studies the plays (and movies) themselves more deeply than is usually the case in literary biography. Her appendix, titled “Abbreviations and Bibliography,” demonstrates her familiarity with some major books of Stoppard criticism up to 2012, although she cites none of their authors’ names in the book itself. For each work, Lee describes the texts Stoppard engaged with in conceiving his plays, proceeds to a descriptive and interpretive summary of the play, and then encapsulates the reviews, often rebutting journalists’ complaints that the plays lack emotion. While Lee’s readings are careful and well-supported, each of these interpretive methods has drawbacks. First, simply because a source text may be interesting and insightful does not ensure a play based on them will be either dramatically or intellectually vital. Second, the interpretations fail to convey that special quality of Stoppard’s plays (the best among them, at least), their contradiction- and skepticism-fueled intellectual vertiginousness, while the plays are treated as literary objects, with no analysis of how they might feel in the moment to a spectator. Finally, focusing on theatre critics complaining about the plays’ lack of “emotion” is not very useful. What is “emotion”? How does one provoke affective response without appealing to cliché and sentimentality? Interestingly, the book allows us to imagine that Stoppard himself began to take this criticism seriously, perhaps to the detriment of the plays themselves. In The Real Thing, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and The Coast of Utopia trilogy, Stoppard arguably offers discrete quanta of emotions based on love relationships to sustain audience engagement with the political themes of the plays.While the dramatic analysis lends intellectual weight to the biography, the fact that Lee seems to like and admire all of Stoppard’s plays is not a strong strategy. The uneven quality of Stoppard’s plays, as perceived by both reviewers and scholars, has been an issue throughout his career. Lee informs us that “in general, Stoppard maintains that however good his plays are, they usually have at least one thing wrong with them” (357). This is not an insight Lee elaborates upon; she did not get Stoppard to divulge what these flaws might be, in what amounts to a lapse of biographical curiosity and critical thinking. There’s a difference between finding the value in one-off experiments, or in minor, flawed, or ambitious but not well-executed work, and feeling compelled to defend such pieces as largely or thoroughly successful; Lee tends toward the latter. She might have earned more credibility by forthrightly criticizing some of the plays and reserving higher praise for others.In the case of The Real Thing, Lee writes some interesting sentences that express the serious reservations Stoppard has about his play. “He knew that the argument about Brodie was heavily weighted in Henry’s favour” (357). (In fact, this wording undersells the point: Brodie is presented as fundamentally fake, so there really is no debate to speak of here.) It would have been helpful if we knew exactly what words the ever-articulate Stoppard used in this regard, but Lee doesn’t provide them, nor apparently did she engage Stoppard in a discussion of the obvious question that follows the thought—to put it bluntly, if he knew this was a fault of the play, why didn’t he fix it? A few pages later, however, Lee seems to have forgotten Stoppard’s self-criticism when she notes, with a tone of disapproval, that “The Real Thing settled the view of him in some quarters as England’s most right-wing playwright” (365).Stoppard’s politics have presented problems for a significant segment of his audience and readers. Can we enjoy the plays while acknowledging Stoppard’s right-wing companions, associations, stances, remarks, and opinions? Maintaining separation between art and artist necessarily becomes difficult when reading a biography. Lee records many of Stoppard’s political utterances without much reservation or qualification. Readers may be surprised to learn that Stoppard often went to lunch with Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. And he often hung out with the deeply (some say rabidly) conservative historian Paul Johnson. If what I knew about a person included that he found Maggie Thatcher and similar company congenial, I would label that person a reactionary right-winger. Lee writes, “In retrospect, he noted her [Thatcher’s] philistinism and her divisiveness” (313). Well, yes. Even at the time, it was not impossible to observe that the divisiveness was pretty much the point, as we’ve learned to say in the Trump era.Lee allows Stoppard to express criticism of recent political circumstances. When Pinter noted to Stoppard that the British government and its institutions protect individual rights such as the freedom to protest and dissent “only up to a point” (239), Stoppard took that idea to heart. Stoppard’s 2013 speech “Circumspice” detailed his sense that the honorable country that gave him refuge and preserved personal liberty was in danger of losing the values of openness and freedom (700–701). At other moments, Lee seems to overestimate Stoppard’s political revisions. For instance, Stoppard admitted in 2005 that he was wrong in previously supporting press tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch, but Lee passes no comment on what sounds an oddly gentle self-reproach: “Now, I’d be capable of writing a letter in reply to myself” (309). Elsewhere she writes that Stoppard’s relationship with Sinead Cusack coincided with his being “less attracted to Thatcherism” (571), but how many moral points one earns for being somewhat less of a Thatcherite is up for debate. Given what we have lived through in the last six years, Lee might have challenged Stoppard to think of the autocratic and nativist tendencies of conservatism as more essence than aberration. One wishes that Lee had asked Stoppard to discuss contemporary political issues such as the roles xenophobia and racism played in Brexit (Stoppard voted Remain [700]) as well as the figures of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. One might measure Stoppard’s current political stances through an August 2021 interview in which Stoppard is quoted on how “cancel culture” is “eroding free speech.” Using such language means you’ve picked a side in our contemporary culture wars.As with politics, so with postmodernism: the record of Stoppard’s words in this book will complicate how scholarship has so frequently positioned his plays within the canon of postmodernism. For instance, Lee refers several times to Stoppard’s remark that “without God, we’re just marking our own homework.” It is a comment that gets less rather than more persuasive with repetition. (If it is an argument for God, it’s not a very good one, as it is quite human-centric—although Lee gets Stoppard to note that he does pray [737].) The remark suggests Stoppard’s perspective is not postmodernist but explicitly premodernist, refusing the groundless yet dizzying freedom offered by the modernist agenda. The remark “public postures have the configuration of private derangement” implies, in the context of Stoppard’s beliefs, that it is only oppositional stances that are thusly deranged, since “postures” in favor of the status quo need not ever be articulated (356). To marginalize oppositional stances runs against any version of postmodernism.Tom Stoppard: A Life is a flattering and comprehensive, if overstuffed, portrait. Given its depth and detail, it will be a necessary resource for scholars of both Stoppard and postwar British drama. Curiously, however, Lee has tonal problems concluding the book and assessing Stoppard’s career. In her final pages, she mentions the difficulties of writing about a living subject and repeats some of Stoppard’s comments about the falsity of any biography. Reflecting on the conversations she had about Stoppard with her sources, Lee writes, two pages from the end of the book, “I am given the sense that he matters . . . that he will be remembered” (752). Of course, it would be perverse of her to have devoted a 754-page book to someone she felt didn’t matter and would soon be forgotten. A few paragraphs later, in another attempt at an ending, Lee alludes to W. H. Auden, one of Stoppard’s favorite poets. Stoppard, she writes, “will live on in his work: you will find him there, as he has always wanted you to. Once he vanishes, he becomes his admirers” (753). This last clause is a close paraphrase of a passage from Auden’s famous elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” In ending her massive biography, Lee reminds us that Stoppard’s work will remain, but that his legacy is entirely a matter of what the future chooses to do with his art.