Arcadia‘s Playwright: Tom Stoppard
By A Noise Within
September 9, 2016
“It is a mistake to assume that plays are the end products of ideas (which would be limiting): the ideas are the end products of the plays.”
TOM STOPPARD was born Tomáš Straüssler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. In 1939 his family immigrated to Singapore, which Tom evacuated with his mother and brother in 1942 before the World War II Japanese invasion. His father, who remained behind, was killed. Stoppard’s mother became a manager of a shoe shop in Darjeeling, India, where Tom met the English language at Mount Hermon (a school run by American Methodists) and his mother met Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British Army. In 1946, Kenneth brought his new family home with him to Derbyshire, England, and gave Tom the name he still uses today.
To learn more about Tom Stoppard, download his more detailed biography here.
