Word: stoppard
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Born in Zlin. Though Stoppard ravels and unravels the destinies of these characters, that is not his prime concern. Utilizing the Socratic method of perpetual questioning, he is assessing the destinies of 20th century man in a Shavian play of jousting ideas. In dramatic kinship, Jumpers is a child of Shaw's Heartbreak House. In that play, written shortly before World War I, Shaw dramatized the sundering of the social fabric of Western civilization. Stoppard is concerned with the moral fabric, the abyss of nonbelief. He sees man, devoid of metaphysical absolutes, as rending his fellow man and reducing...
...Stoppard, with his large, luminous brown eyes that seem to pierce both inward and outward, is a bit of a moon gazer. His background, like his voice, has a trace of the exotic. He was born in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 as Thomas Straussler. When he was two years old, his father, a doctor, moved to Singapore. As the Japanese began infiltrating Southeast Asia, Tom, his mother and his older brother were sent on to India. (His father later died in a Japanese prison camp.) Tom learned English in Darjeeling. Taking his stepfather's name, he arrived in England...
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger triggered Stoppard's desire to write plays-as it did many another English no-school-tie boy. His first full-length play, A Walk on the Water (about the family of a noninventive inventor), was produced on BBC television during the week of President Kennedy's assassination. "It wasn't the greatest week to have a comedy on," Stoppard recalls. Three years later came Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-and fame. In view of the gentle, unassuming nature of Tom Stoppard's personality, fame is a word...
Although George, the philosopher-hero of Jumpers, expresses a need for metaphysical convictions, Stoppard claims he himself vacillates between uncertainties: "I might subscribe to certain beliefs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and to a totally different set on Tuesday and Thursday. I think that a sense of conflict between one's emotional response to absolute morality and one's rational sense of the implausibility of there being a God is obviously a part of what I call 'the Ping Pong game.' I always write about two people arguing. I play Ping Pong with myself, but there...
Catch-23. The organic process of writing fascinates Stoppard: "I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is catch-23. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins...