Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love which won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Paltrow also received a nomination for the Best Actress

Tom Stoppard, the playwright, will become the theme of a play to be staged in Darjeeling later this year.

The play, still in the research stage, will not dwell on the stuff that catapulted him into international limelight or the film, Shakespeare in Love, which won him an Oscar in 1999 for best screenplay.

In focus, will be the quiet years spent by Stoppard in Darjeeling as a student of Mount Hermon, a period which very few people known about.

“Not many are aware that Stoppard studied in Darjeeling between 1941 and 1945. I have already started researching on the project, called Stoppard in Darjeeling, and should be able to stage the play by September,” said Parnab Mukherjee, who is pursing a fellowship in alternative theatre and media with the US-based Interact Foundation.

Recently, he staged Rabindranath Tagore’s Muktadhara at Paglajhora, where the Nobel Laureate had penned it in 1922.

Like his earlier performance, this one too will be staged in open air near Shurberry Park, which according to Mukherjee is “one of the few places in Darjeeling that has remained untouched by the construction boom”.

Stoppard was born at Ziln in Czechoslovakia in 1937. To escape the Nazis onslaught, his family fled to Singapore. In 1941, the family moved out again before the Japanese invasion. This time, they landed in India.

Stoppard remembers his school as the “place where he first played baseball”.

The playwright has also admitted that Darjeeling had a profound influence on his life, informed Mukherjee.

In his attempt to explore the bond between Stoppard and Darjeeling, Mukherjee plans to involve only local artistes.

The play will continue for a little over an hour and consists of four acts. It will deal right from the time Stoppard and his family escaped from Czechoslovakia, said Mukherjee.

Stoppard shot to fame with the television play Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), which was immediately hailed as a modern dramatic masterpiece.

Apart from his serious comedies and work for the stage, Stoppard has also written a number of screenplays.