Britain's first playwright to be knighted since Terence Rattigan (though admittedly Harold Pinter turned one down), described once as a "national treasure", and champion of theatrical erudition clothed in scathing wit, Tom Stoppard is a man who has been doubling his own life, and that of his characters, since he first fled his native Czechoslovakia in 1939 at the age of two, to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews.
In his adoptive England he had to transform himself from Tomás Sträussler of Zlín into Tom Stoppard of Bristol, which resulted in a life-long generation of denials and counter-denials about his origins. But in this, Stoppard's 65th year, Nadel's biography weaves a painstakingly careful path through the obfuscation of the playwright, to reveal how a Czech Jew became the quintessential Englishman, the cultural arm-candy of the British establishment, and even the literary lip-gloss of Hollywood.
Nadel avoids the broad biographical arcs which might have sectioned his life into his pre-literary career, his early comedies, his political agency, his theatrical marriage of science and art, and his screenwriting, (inserting along the way his wives, persona, and dalliances with other media). Instead, the author deliberately assembles the jigsaw of a life and career into bite-sized chunks of fact (each headed by a Stoppardian epigram), in an often meandering and repetitious narrative. The result is sometimes tantalizing (for instance, when we are nudged over the first third of the book to the opening night of his first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). At other times it is frustrating (when Shakespeare in Love is first mentioned only to be dropped for an inordinately long time in order to preserve chronology).
Stoppard's playwriting career, unsurprisingly, constitutes the largest component of the biography, and the production details, gossip, and contractual facts make for fascinating reading. Another strength of Nadel's is to provide brief sketches of the peripheral high-profile figures in Stoppard's life, particularly Laurence Olivier, the last of the actor-managers and director of the National Theatre, where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was produced. The picture is vivid of Olivier struggling to tolerate Stoppard's unconventional writing talent which challenged every notion of character on which Olivier had based his career.
A clear picture of British culture in the 1960s also emerges, with the theatre as the nub of post-war British high culture, and Nadel is illuminating, too, on how Stoppard cleverly transcended his Jagger-like rock-star image to become a favoured playwright of the middle-classes.
Stoppard was the theatrical icon of a period of genuinely "Cool Britannia" long before the concept re-emerged as a media-invented phenomenon. Throughout the book, in reports of his activism for writers' rights behind the Iron Curtain, and in his honourable commitment to his children, we glimpse - behind the television and stage persona of an epigrammatic contortionist and philosophical gymnast - a man of integrity, assurance, morality and occasional insecurity.
Often thought of as a maverick writer, the scourge of the Left for his conservative tastes in art and politics (he admitted to admiring Margaret Thatcher), he was never one of the "angry young men". As a foreigner to English theatre, he should be placed alongside an epigrammatic Wilde and proselytizing Shaw, and with his contemporaries, Christopher Hampton and Michael Frayn. His plays divide audiences as they are often constructed to prove as well as debate complex scientific theories (such as quantum physics in Hapgood and chaos theory in Arcadia).
French critics have labelled Stoppard's work "a theatre of ideas", casts have to be lectured by senior experts in their respective fields, and audiences need an extraordinary degree of alertness to follow the complex debates unfolding before them. Nadel's analysis of his work also needs close scrutiny. Stoppard's imminent trilogy at London's Royal National Theatre, The Coast of Utopia, no doubt will drive the intelligentsia into a frenzy once more. At the same time, the Oscar-winner, for huge sums, is doctoring Hollywood scripts without credit, proving just how successful the double-act of the non-native Englishman is.
Brian Singleton is acting head of the School of Drama Studies, Trinity College, Dublin
Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard By Ira Nadel. Methuen, 621pp. £25 sterling