Overview

""The story of Stoppard's life is a compelling one and it is laid out with extraordinary detail in this first major biography"" - Evening Standard Double Act is the first major biography of one of the world's celebrated most writers, From his early theatrical success as the youngest playwright ever produced at the National Theatre, to his Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard's work is renowned for its dazzling wit, invention and box-office appeal. But his real life is a more complicated affair still; and this acclaimed and authoritative book reveals the remarkable private story of a man who from childhood had to invent his own personality, and whose multi-layered dramas reflect the enduring contradictions of his life. ""An impressive biography ... it makes a good story out of that most unpromising subject, an unqualified and extended triumph."" Spectator ""Appealingly embellished with Stoppard's shrewd witticisms about his work and full of keen perceptions of its own, Double Act offers an exhaustive and enlightening overview of a singular talent that is happiest when expressing itself in dual ways."" Sunday Times ""Nadel is excellent at providing an exposition of Stoppard's ideas and the wider social context in which he lives."" Independent on Sunday ""A searching biography of this mercurial writer ... Nadel builds an engrossing picture of someone in continual self-reinvention."" Jewish Chronicle ""Stoppard's playwriting career, unsurprisingly, constitutes the largest component of the biography, and the production details, gossip and contractual facts make for fascinating reading."" Irish Times ""If the genius of Nadel's subject lies in paradox, it also needs genius to turn that paradox into an event. This book is one, and a palpable hit."" Good Book Guide ""Essential reading for all students of theatre."" Hampstead & Highgate

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9780413730602

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Reviews

Every now and then comes along a literary biography so good it makes you want to rush off and read all the subject's works even if you already have. Or in this case see, because Professor Nadel's life of Tom Stoppard is as provocative as anything the playwright has conjured up for stage or screen. His parents fleeing the Jewish ghetto of Prague in 1939, the early childhood of the boy born Tomas Strausler were characterized by disruption and bereavement. By the age of eight, he had been thrown into at least three different cultures. Eventually settling in England, Stoppard's whole-hearted embracing of his adopted country could never quite conceal an ambivalence about his true identity founded in those disordered roots. It created a contradiction that, until recently, lay not just at the core of his private life but one which, rather than attempting to resolve, he exploited for the creative freedoms it offered. Critics have on occasion dismissed Stoppard as merely a technician, ignoring his perception of theatre as an endless dialogue on the dilemma of being caught between two perspectives. 'I put a position,' he said in an interview in 1972. '(I) rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Forever. Endlessly.' It was into this quicksilver dialectic that Stoppard injected an element vital to his meteoric rise to success: humour. He became the playwright who, extraordinarily for a serious modern dramatist, scored high marks in the popularity polls. In tracing Stoppard's professional and personal progress from the overnight sensation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, through the 'Golden Couple' marriage to TV celebrity doctor Miriam to the affair with Felicity Kendal, knighthood and an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Ira Nadel never loses sight of his argument. If the genius of his subject lies in paradox, it also needs genius to turn that paradox into an event. This book is one, and a palpable hit. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Ira Nadel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and a winner of the Medal for Canadian Biography. Based at the University of British Columbia, he has lectured throughout Europe, North America and Asia. His works include Love and Russian Literature, From Benjamin to Woolf (2024), Philip Roth, A Counterlife (2021), Virginia Woolf (2016), Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002) and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (1996).

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