Tom Stoppard’s breakthrough play opened on a bare stage, with two characters in the middle of nowhere tossing a coin. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, notoriously mix-uppable minor characters from the lower reaches of the Hamlet cast list, meet actors on the road to Elsinore, face the haughty Danish court, board the ship that takes them to their unwitting deaths – but they don’t really go anywhere, except in their puzzled, playful minds. They are always on the road to nowhere, a long way from home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and they’re the only ones who don’t know it.
Some writers create a dramatic territory so identifiable you could type it into a satnav. Harold Pinter’s grubby suburbia, David Hare’s deceitful establishment, Caryl Churchill’s unmoored dystopia. Home in Stoppard is a fitful notion: often historically and geographically exact, but rarely found in the same place twice. He is hardly an autobiographical writer, but the biography gives a clue. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937, he wasn’t even two years old when, as the Nazis invaded, his family left the country. Then came Singapore and Darjeeling and, after his mother’s second marriage, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Bristol. Later came tours behind the iron curtain in support of dissident artists with Amnesty and PEN. Stoppard was the image of the cosmopolitan intellectual, a restless, rootless imagination. But where do his plays feel at home?
