'You can't help being what you write'

Tom Stoppard believes he has cracked the old chestnut of whether Chekhov's plays are comedies. "It suddenly became perfectly clear to me," he says, "that you could answer with another question: 'Is life?' So it stops being a puzzle." In Chekhov, as in life, a "production with no laughs" would hardly be to Stoppard's taste. Chekhov "liked laughter through unshed tears".

If Chekhov has long been a puzzle, so, in a sense, has Stoppard. In a 45-year career spanning stage, screen and radio, he is credited with bringing ideas back into British theatre. With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), first seen on the Edinburgh fringe, he became the youngest playwright to be staged by the National, and spawned a sub-genre of bit-players placed centre-stage. Later mixing historical and fictitious characters he still made riotously free with the English canon, from Hamlet to Agatha Christie. Even such a recent hit as the television serial Rome bows to Stoppard's attendant lords in its clueless centurion double act on the sidelines of imperial intrigue.

Although Stoppard sees his plays as "more unlike, than like, each other - they vary from farce to the sub-Shavian", "Stoppardian" has become a trademark, not least for rapid-fire wit and bathetic juxtaposition, whether moral philosophy with gymnastics, as in Jumpers (1972), or the collision of Lenin, Joyce and Tristan Tzara with Wildean pastiche in Travesties (1974).

The playwright has proved adept at knocking Hollywood blockbusters into shape, from Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) and Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987), to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Michael Apted's Enigma (2001). The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1991) he directed in prewar Yugoslavia won the Golden Lion at Venice, while John Madden's seven-Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1999), which he co-wrote, brought his unmistakable repartee to a new generation. Yet was he more than dazzlingly entertaining?

Stoppard is a self-professed "timid libertarian" and his love of "English landscape, English architecture, English character" marked him down for some as a conservative. He accepted a knighthood in 1997, and the Order of Merit in 2000. Yet he has increasingly explored landscapes from his deeper past, in Indian Ink (1995) and his most recent play on Czechoslovakian and English freedoms, set between the Prague spring and the Velvet revolution, Rock'n'Roll (2006).

A common carp used to be that his plays were all cleverness and no heart, until his critics were moved to tears by a young woman's impending death by fire in Arcadia (1993), and by the lament for a drowned child in his trilogy on 19th-century Russia, The Coast of Utopia (2002). For Michael Billington, "although Stoppard was always prized for intellectual fireworks, wordplay and razzle-dazzle, what's interesting is the romanticism that lies beneath. The emotional content was either hidden or ignored." Ira Nadel, professor of English at the University of British Columbia and author of Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (2002), views the comedy as a mask. "His display of intellect masks the intensity of his feelings," he says. "He's a very impersonal writer; his plays are not confessional - he doesn't use the stage as a diary." Yet, while he "discards autobiography, he constantly explores identity".

Asked where he got his ideas from, Stoppard used to reply, "Harrods". Nadel thinks his fuel is history. Yet he seems inspired not so much by any period as by the clash and tension of abstract ideas. He prides himself on being able to argue all sides, leaving the audience to judge. Stoppard, who has written only one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), quips that "dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself". His imagination is drawn to situational paradox. Yet he waits for a spark. "I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play," he says. "It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn."

At Chelsea harbour he gestures across the marina to his apartment of 20 years. Aged 71, and twice divorced (he separated from his second wife, Dr Miriam Stoppard, in 1990), he has four sons and seven grandchildren. The New York Times has described his accent as "crisp" and "plummy", bearing "scant trace of his emigré status". Yet despite his family's having fled Czechoslovakia when he was one and a half, a Mitteleuropean vestige does remain. His mother retained her Czech accent till her death in 1996, aged 85. He recently sold his house in Provence, having spent much of last year in New York. The Coast of Utopia won seven Tony awards, while Rock'n'Roll was a Broadway hit. His new version of Chekhov's first finished play, Ivanov (1887), with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role, previews from Friday as part of the Donmar West End season in London. His adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, for Sam Mendes, is to open in New York in January before touring to Britain. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, his 1977 play co-written with André Previn, is meanwhile being revived in January on the National Theatre's Olivier stage. About the plight of Soviet dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, it features a genuine lunatic who imagines a symphony orchestra in his cell.

For Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar, who directs Ivanov, the new adaptation "invites us to share the humour of a man clearly suffering. It's comic writing on the edge." Stoppard, who worked with the Russian translator Helen Rappaport, says his versions of Chekhov, Schnitzler, Lorca, Pirandello or Jerome K Jerome have come about "simply because I'm asked. If I'm not doing something of my own, I enjoy adapting." Although Chekhov was writing before the 1905 revolution, Stoppard resists the "Chekhovian generality that here was a society heading for the precipice". Nor does he hold with the view "that the plays are about parasitic aristocrats with nothing to do except be victims of history. It doesn't stand up: they work hard." As for the comedy, "Chekhov kept begging actors not to emote tragically - to keep things light and fast. He was trying to get actors to act against the emotion. So confusions have been inherited as to whether it was meant to be funny."

The play poses another puzzle. Ivanov's wife is a Jewish convert, whom Ivanov at one point calls a "silly yid". "The casual antisemitism of the period in Russia - and certainly Britain - is very discomforting," Stoppard says. "Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against antisemitism. It's as though the culture was in some kind of transition."

Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straüssler in 1937, in Zlin, a Moravian town in Czechoslovakia that was the centre of an "empire of shoes". His father Eugen was a doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturers, and the family fled after the Nazi invasion of 1939, with other Jewish doctors working for Bata. They spent three years in Singapore, before the Japanese invasion forced his mother, Martha, to flee with "Tommy" and his elder brother Peter to British India. Their father was to follow, but his ship was sunk by Japanese bombers. "Even now I don't know precisely how he died. The wives didn't find out anything till years later. I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived."

India, which he sees as a "lost domain of uninterrupted happiness", was "exciting and exotic - I felt protected". The family moved around before settling in Darjeeling, where his mother managed the local Bata shoe shop. "We weren't Raj because we were Czech refugees. What meant most to me was the physical India - chapatis cooking over a camel-dung fire. I haven't ever stopped dreaming about it."

He later wrote Indian Ink for Felicity Kendal, with whom he had an eight-year relationship in the 1990s. The play staged a debate about empire, with a post-Forsterian take on relationships between Indians and Britons. Returning to India in his 40s, Stoppard says, "I met elderly Indian people who had regret for the days of the Raj. So I've always been very divided about empire being a Bad Thing."

After the war ended, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, an army major. Early in 1946 they disembarked at Southampton into "freezing cold. But we drove up to Nottingham, to my stepfather's family, and were warmly welcomed." Tom was eight. "By that time, English was my only language. Suddenly I was an English schoolboy."

His mother was a "worrying mother, a very sweet woman who loved to read and made good jokes. She came out of a culture where women served men, and my stepfather came from a culture which agreed with that. He was an outdoor person. He read very little."

Stoppard did A-levels at 17 and left school to be a journalist in Bristol. He relishes the "pleasure of self-instruction". As a second-string drama critic, he made friends at the Bristol Old Vic, then moved to London to write for radio and television before theatre. "Everybody else was writing for the stage then, and I wanted to be a writer." It was a golden age, when "theatre came into its majority, its glory". According to Billington, "English postwar drama had a resistance to intellectual concepts: you started with character, whereas Stoppard starts with an idea." Though he sees Stoppard's first hit as derivative - "Waiting for Godot in Elizabethan costume" - Billington acknowledges that at a time when theatre was too often associated with a muddy realism, Stoppard brought Technicolor, "delighting in language and the illusions of theatre".

There are still, Stoppard believes, "few things more uplifting than a great play or film - and few things more awful than a bad one". For him, theatre is "first and foremost a recreation. But it's not just a children's playground; it can be recreation for people who like to stretch their minds."

He was in the early flush of success when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague spring. "I remember the detachment I felt in 1968 from what was happening in Prague, when I'd been in England for 20 years," he says. But visiting Czechoslovakia in 1977 ("to do my English bit for Charter 77"), he became friends with playwright and future president Václav Havel and other dissident writers. He also visited Soviet dissidents, including the Sakharovs, in Moscow. In The Coast of Utopia, when someone says of Ivan Turgenev's novels, "so you don't take sides?" the novelist responds, "I take every possible side." For Stoppard, "that was my at-rest mode for the first few years, mostly because I didn't know the answer to these conundrums. But in eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s, I did take sides. I wasn't up for any cause going; looking back, my focus was very narrow. I was interested in the shadow thrown by Soviet communism."

His television play Professional Foul (1977) combined moral philosophy and football in communist Prague, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) was inspired by the banned Czech playwright Pavel Kohout's abbreviated living-room Shakespeare, while the TV play Squaring the Circle (1984) tilted at General Jaruzelski's martial law in Poland.

"It was a relief to be able to participate in a case clear to me," Stoppard says. He was at odds with what he sees as the "agitprop revolution" of 1968 and British leftwing politics. "I was impatient with the sloppy use of the language of human rights. I resented people here elevating themselves to the position occupied by people who really had to worry about being jailed for what they wrote."

Night and Day (1978), on the ethics of journalism, skewered the closed shop. Describing himself as "gung-ho for Wapping", Stoppard later praised Margaret Thatcher for crushing the print unions. Yet, as he told the British Journalism Review in 2005, his zeal then for an untrammelled press had mattered more to him than her "philistinism". Recalling his past objections to the equating of media ownership by tycoons with censorship, he says: "Now I'd be capable of writing a letter in reply to myself . . . Look at Berlusconi and Putin - it's complete manipulation and control."

After The Real Thing (1982) - for Billington, "one of the most painful plays about the agony of infidelity written since the war" - his work became even more of an intellectual stretch. In Hapgood (1988), he combined quantum mechanics with cold-war spying, and in Arcadia, chaos theory with Byron and 18th-century landscape gardening. He says he reads popular science "for pleasure, not research - and not for the prose. I do try to be as accurate as I can." Yet he can also be "completely cavalier: if I discover something didn't really happen, I say the whole thing's made up, a parallel world."

The Coast of Utopia, set mainly before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, depicts Russian intellectuals washed up as refugees in England after the 1848 revolutions across Europe, divided between revolution and peaceful change. Again, it was paradox, not period, that drew him in. "I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen."

He found a personal hero in the early socialist Alexander Herzen, who in the play says: "Until we stop killing our way towards [Utopia], we won't be grown up as human beings." "That certainly struck home with me," Stoppard says. "The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong." He adds, "One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed."

He identifies, too, with Turgenev, who said, "I'm not pure spirit, but I'm not society's keeper either." "Alas, yes, that's my temperament," Stoppard says. "I felt close to his character when I was writing the play in ways which made me feel better - and worse - about myself. He had a terror of violence, and didn't consider himself to be a revolutionary, but in the movement of history, he knew which way he wanted the river to go."

Rock'n'Roll drew on fierce political arguments among Czech intellectuals, yet also contains a lament for the erosion of freedoms in Britain's own "democracy of obedience". Jan, the Czech anglophile who returns to Prague after the Soviet invasion, is a shadow self, a character from a possible "autobiography in a parallel world where I returned 'home' after the war". Stoppard was surprised to find love taking over the plot. "When the love story came together," he says, "the play was over - it was no longer interesting."

On whether there is more emotional heart in his later work, Stoppard says: "I recognise some truth in that. It indicates some loss of self-protectiveness - a shyness in my 20s and 30s. You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form." His stance towards his past may also have shifted. Only in the early 1990s, after "the communists fell and the blind went up" did Stoppard learn from distant Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters. After his parents' deaths, he returned with his elder brother to Zlin in 1998, for the first time in almost 60 years. Writing in Talk magazine in 1999, he expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past. But he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."

The Talk article was scathing about his late stepfather, who believed that "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life", telling his small stepson: "Don't you realise that I made you British?" Days after his wife died, he wrote to his stepson asking him to stop using the Stoppard name, concerned about his "tribalisation" - his championing of Soviet Jews. Stoppard replied that it would not be "practical". He now says he regrets revealing that episode. "It was too personal. The poor man had lost his wife and was upset."

Stoppard remains close to his four sons: Oliver, a Norfolk postman; Barnaby, who owns a gourmet fast-food outlet; William, who manages his wife, rock violinist Linzi Stoppard; and Ed, an actor. "I worry about them all," he says. "Some parents take it as an axiom that their child will be the best pianist or cook. To my discredit, I'm sceptical." Yet when Ed Stoppard played Hamlet, "it completely thrilled me - it was so intelligently spoken".

He once wrote ironically of his childhood self, that he was "coming on well as an honorary Englishman". The world may be more open now to layered identities, but his unease remains. "I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in," he says. "I find I put a foot wrong - it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history - and suddenly I'm there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket." His characters, he notes, are "constantly being addressed by the wrong name, with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names".

Resistant to self-analysis, Stoppard alights on a paradox. "A writer ought to be the best possible source about their work," he says, "but the writing instinct doesn't come out of self-examination. That part of yourself in your work is expressed willy-nilly, without your cooperation, motivation or collusion. You can't help being what you write and writing what you are."

Stoppard on Stoppard

"BIRDBOOT: It's Higgs."

This otherwise unexceptional line still brings back one of those moments when you wanted to get up from your desk and shout "Hallelujah!"

Birdboot is a character in The Real Inspector Hound. Higgs is a corpse, an unidentified body in and out of view from the beginning of the murder mystery play which Birdboot, a theatre critic, has been attending. There comes the moment when Birdboot, finding himself enmeshed in the mystery, turns the body over and recognises it. It's Higgs! Hallelujah! The perfect solution to the mystery which had been worrying me since I'd begun writing the play: who was the body?

After 40 years, the problem remains, each time. You can't start writing until you know what you're doing, and you don't know what you're doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out well, you shouldn't feel clever, you should feel lucky.

· Quote from The Real Inspector Hound, published by Avalon