He is now a playwright of international reputation in Europe and the United States. Stoppard is emphatically a professional writer, with a primary interest in stagecraft: each new play is designed specifically for a small fringe company, a commercial West End production, or for performance at the National Theatre in London. His popularity extends to both the intellectual avant-garde and the ordinary theatergoer. Since the 1960s his work has developed in other areas, from absurdist or surrealist comedy to political and even polemical drama. Toward the end of the 1970s the plays became less experimental in method and more overtly serious in tone, although with a return to pure farce in some productions. His career to date confirms his importance, not merely as a theatrical phenomenon, but as a major contemporary playwright.
Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard is the younger son of Eugene and Martha Straussler. His father, a doctor with the shoe manufacturing firm Bata, was moved by the company to Singapore shortly before World War II. When his wife and family were evacuated to India Eugene Straussler remained in Singapore and was killed after the Japanese invasion in 1941. In India the family lived in Darjeeling, where Martha was, for a time, manager of the Bata shoe shop and where Tom received his early schooling.
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