Sir Tom Stoppard was haunted by the ghosts of his parallel lives. Many of his plays are protracted counterfactuals: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) asks ‘what if Hamlet were told from a different perspective?’; Travesties (1974) ‘what if three great men who were all in Zurich in 1917 had actually met?’ Later, counterfactuals from Stoppard’s own life began to bleed into his writing. In Professional Foul (1977), the protagonist, a Cambridge professor, is intercepted by one of his former students at a colloquium in Prague. Pavel Hollar had got a first, but now he is a cleaner at a bus station. His independence of mind, his commitment to liberal individualism, had not endeared him to the communist authorities. It can’t be a coincidence that Hollar, played by the Irishman Stephen Rea, looks rather like the young Stoppard, with his black mane and square jaw.

Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006) tugged more at this thread: what would Stoppard’s life have looked like had he grown up in Czechoslovakia, the country of his birth? Most likely, he wouldn’t have been very good at keeping his mouth shut. Jan – named Tomáš in the first draft – once told his disbelieving schoolmates that in England people can live and work anywhere they like. Jan’s mother is questioned by the police, and loses her job at the shoe factory. It’s another interesting morsel of authorial self-insertion: Stoppard’s father had been a company doctor at Bata footwear.

Stoppard’s English stepfather, Major Kenneth Stoppard, taught him ‘to fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the Monarchy’. These were lessons well learned. Sir Tom accepted the knighthood when it came, while his friend Harold Pinter did not. Nor did he go along with the soixante-huitards: ‘I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.’ The Major had believed, with Cecil Rhodes, that ‘to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life’. His stepson believed this, too, and had better reason to than most.

‘Life is a gamble, at terrible odds’, says The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; ‘if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.’ One can hardly imagine worse odds than to have been born a Jew in Czechoslovakia in 1937. Stoppard was lucky. He was lucky that his family was able to escape Czechoslovakia for Singapore the day Hitler invaded; he was lucky that he was then able to get to India, albeit without his father, when the Japanese arrived; and he was lucky that his mother then found herself courted by a British major, even if he could be a cantankerous xenophobe, whose relationship with his famous stepson was often strained. Without that stroke of fortune, Stoppard, even having survived the Germans and the Japanese, might then have found himself at the mercy of the communists back in Czechoslovakia, and become a Hollar or a Jan.

Stoppard spoke often of this luck, and of the obligations it carried. His mother did not want him to get involved in the cause for liberty across the Iron Curtain: ‘We’ve got to England; don’t make waves.’ His stepfather thought that his campaign for the Jewish refuseniks was ‘tribal’, a betrayal of his Englishness. Stoppard refused. He had a voice, an English voice, which he could raise against the communists. ‘I’ve been lucky all my life, and the way I can live really begins with fate making me an “English writer” instead of a Czech one.’ Sticking his own head above the parapet was an ‘occasional necessary nuisance which I think I owe to my good luck’.

He was grateful to be an Englishman, and had a strong sense for what that meant. England was no mere ‘conspiracy of cartographers’, as Guildenstern says (or is it Rosencrantz?) while they sail from Denmark to their doom. Stoppard, plus anglais que les anglais, had a feeling for l’Angleterre profonde. He was drawn to the folky Englishness of that corner of Derbyshire in which he went to school and later set Arcadia (1993), and of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who features among his Desert Island Discs. He was alert to the meaning of English history: ‘a thousand years of knowing who you are’, Jan says in Rock ‘n’ Roll, ‘gives a people confidence in its judgement’. Jan looks with envy and admiration at those institutions which that history has produced: trial by jury and free speech are sacrosanct, and ‘if the government doesn’t like it, tough shit’. This gratitude, this old-fashioned belief in English liberty that our native elites and artists have long since abandoned, touches all his plays. Even the more anticolonial characters of Indian Ink (1995) guiltily admit to feeling some affection for England and Englishness. Macaulay produced Gandhi. ‘Fifty years of independence’, one character says, ‘and we are still hypnotised!’

In 2013, however, Stoppard confessed that he was beginning to feel a need to write ‘obsequies for the England we have mislaid’. Leveson, the expenses scandal, the general crumminess of public life, proved a ‘fall from grace at the very heart of the freedoms hard-won long before I was a schoolboy agog with pride at being British’. Traces of such obsequies sneak into Stoppard’s script for a television dramatisation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (2012). ‘I love every field and hedgerow’, grumbles Benedict Cumberbatch’s Christopher: ‘the land is England, and once it was the foundation of order, before money took over and handed the country to swindlers and schemers – the Toryism of the pig’s trough.’

Stoppard’s feeling of luck likewise mutated, later on, into something approaching survivor’s guilt. In Rock ‘n’ Roll a Czech interrogator presses Jan on whether he’s Jewish: ‘well are you or aren’t you?’ ‘Yes’, he replies. Stoppard’s last play, Leopoldstadt (2020), was his attempt to answer that question less equivocally, having at last digested the fact that all his grandparents had died in the Holocaust. There, Stoppard’s alter ego is Leonard Chamberlain, né Leopold Rosenbaum, a character like Stoppard in many respects save that he confronts his Jewishness when he is still in his twenties. ‘I loved being English’, he says; ‘being made British’, when his mother remarried an Englishman, ‘was the greatest good fortune that could possibly have happened to me’.

‘I’m proud to be British, to belong to a nation which is looked up to for… you know… fair play and parliament and freedom of everything, asylum for exiles and refugees, the Royal Navy, the royal family…’

The English patriotism is sincere, and it is recognisably Stoppard’s own. But, he is admonished, his Englishness should not demand the total sacrifice, as Stoppard’s mother and the Major might have liked, of all that came before. ‘Nobody is born eight years old’ – the age Stoppard was, too, when he first set foot on English soil. ‘Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued.’ Sir Tom Stoppard was an Englishman, a Czech, and a Jew: his life was Tomáš Sträussler’s continued.