Stoppard: Please Don’t Call Him Genius

Before he was 30, Tom Stoppard, a Czechoslovakian emigre, high school dropout and British journalism roustabout, wrote a play that made him famous. But fame is always relative; the erudite playwright of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” jovially bats away the f-word as well as the accolades that have come to be attached to his reputation in the 32 years since: genius, brilliant, Britain’s cleverest living playwright, even, according to New York magazine, “the smartest playwright on the planet.”

He’s been knighted--the suggestion of being addressed as “Sir Tom” produces a grimace--and showered with awards, but when it seems inevitable that he answer a question about how this, er, notoriety, has changed his life, he typically offers a self-effacing, modest example:

Shortly after last year’s Academy Awards ceremony, where Stoppard’s screenplay for the runaway hit “Shakespeare in Love” found him summoned to the podium to collect an Oscar, he boarded an airplane in Los Angeles and was instantly recognized by the attendant.

“She got quite excited,” he seems mildly pleased to report. “I’d never been recognized by the cabin staff on an airplane.” However, celebrityhood “lasted about a day,” its notable side effect, he observed at the time, “to give me diarrhea.”

Things are on a more even keel these days. Stoppard has written a movie script from Robert Harris’ novel about World War II code-breaking, “Enigma,” which began shooting in April, and has been intermittently working on a new play about artistic freedom in 19th century Russia.

In London, the revival of “The Real Thing,” one of his best-known works for the stage, was considered so successful that the production has been transferred intact to Broadway.

Stoppard brought his sad-dog eyes to New York, where he’s been patiently chain-smoking his way through interviews and, more to his liking, “getting reunited” with the people involved in his play at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

“We’re all on this raft together; nobody understands us,” he says of the theater world. “I love being with them. Playwrights are the luckiest people.”

He means just that. “People believe me to be far more erudite than I am,” he says, adding, “I’m not stupid; I understand that I can do certain things well, even very well. But I have a gift that is something I didn’t work to get.”

So logic follows that “you can’t throw words like genius around. It takes the language into inflation, its Weimar period where you needed millions of marks to buy a bottle of milk.”

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A tall, genial fellow whose unruly mop of graying hair and prominent facial features evoke glimmers of the drag character in that Victorian farce “Charley’s Aunt” and/or Susan Sontag (others have glimpsed a heftier Mick Jagger), Stoppard is putting the finishing touches on his daily toilet: buttoning up and tucking in his shirt, rolling up the cuffs. Twice divorced, the father of four sons, he seems very much at ease with himself and the world in general.

After more than two dozen plays--1998’s “The Invention of Love” is his most recent--he says, hardly convincingly: “If anything, I’d like to stop.” An inventive and original mind aside, Stoppard always has insisted that ideas for plays have not come easily to him.

The way he’s worked is, during the wait he writes movie scripts. “There will always be an interesting film to adapt. You understand that’s a different sort of work, it’s not personal to me, sort of like a craft.”

Stoppard is often asked why he has never written about his early life. Born Thomas Straussler, he and his family left Zulin, Czechoslovakia, for Singapore to escape the Nazis and later were evacuated to India. His father, who had remained in Singapore, was killed by the invading Japanese, and his mother remarried a British army major named Stoppard. After the war, the family settled in England.

“I had a thought once about writing about a boy who stayed [in Czechoslovakia] or went back to live after the war. A kind of false autobiography. But I haven’t.”

Several years ago, Stoppard and his brother journeyed to Zulin and found the family’s house. The experience was “unbearably moving,” he says, but more for “the journey my mother made” than any nostalgic insight into his own past. Having flippantly referred to himself as a “bounced Czech,” he says he remembers virtually nothing from that time. “I was an English boy, really.”

“The Real Thing,” first produced in 1982, has been called Stoppard’s most autobiographical play. Its male protagonist is Henry, a pop-music-loving, verbally ambidextrous playwright who divorces one actress to marry another.

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While the playwright agrees that “Henry sounds off like me,” he insists that “Henry is not a conduit for me. It is not autobiographical in the narrative sense, but certainly in a personal way it is.” Their musical tastes are also similar--like Stoppard, Henry “can’t tell one opera from another.” Herman’s Hermits, the Righteous Brothers and the Monkees set the mood. “Oh, I may be a bit more sophisticated,” the writer concedes, himself preferring Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.

Because he knew comparisons would be drawn with his own life, he says he tried writing Henry as a novelist. “But I wanted to write a play in which the first scene was written by a character in the second scene. Also, I didn’t know much about the world of novelists.”

Unlike many of the playwright’s multilayered works that encompass heady topics as varied as quantum mechanics (“Hapgood”), Shakespearean spinoffs (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”) and art and revolutionary politics (“Travesties”), “The Real Thing” is about love, marriage and friendship--”universal conditions,” as Stoppard views them.

Has he, the playwright is asked, had much personal experience with the title of his play? “At my age it would be rather sad if the answer was no. There have been experiences every couple of decades.” He is specific only about the first: “I was about 8, and fell passionately in love with the matron’s daughter--an older woman of about 10--at my boarding school in Darjeeling.

“When I was in my 40s, I actually had a letter from her. She wrote, ‘I’ve been reading about you and wondered if you might remember me.’ I immediately wrote back, ‘Not only do I remember, I was passionately in love with you!’ And she never replied.”