Witty and playful writer who took ideas seriously

Sir Tom Stoppard was one of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights. His writings were witty and entertaining, he took ideas seriously, and he enjoyed philosophical and political debates.

He had a parallel career as a Hollywood script doctor, in high demand for adding sparkle to other people’s film scripts, and shared a best screenplay Oscar for his entertaining contributions to Shakespeare in Love.

He was a writer who managed to combine an intellectual’s delight in complexity with an artist’s ability to have fun.

Games like Arcadia, Jumpers, and early hits like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead have sometimes been criticized for lacking emotional depth, too much spectacle and too little substance.

But his later works displayed greater human sympathy, even if they were sometimes received coolly by critics.

Perhaps his distinctive qualities as a playwright reflected his background: part Mitteleuropean intellectual, part self-deprecating, public-school-educated, cricket-loving Englishman.

Tomas Straussler was born on July 3, 1937, in what was then Czechoslovakia, where his Jewish father worked as a doctor for the Bata shoe company. His parents fled the impending Nazi invasion when he was a baby and went to Singapore, where his father died in a Japanese prison camp.

Tom, his mother and brother had escaped before the Japanese occupation and went first to Australia and then to India. There her mother met and married an Englishman, Major Stoppard.

Stoppard became a journalist, initially at the Western Daily Press in Bristol. An early break came in 1963 when his first stage play, A Walk on the Water (later retitled Enter a Free Man), was broadcast on ITV.

But the play that really made him famous was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 and transferred to London’s National Theater in 1967.

He took two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and put them at the centre; They were stunned and bewildered by the seemingly arbitrary events going on around them.

He was great: like Samuel Beckett but with much better jokes.

He followed this with intense theatrical diversions, often revolving around unexpected intellectual conceits or strange juxtapositions and featuring brilliant dialogue, puns, repartee, double meanings, and misunderstandings.

Jumpers was a game about academic philosophy and gymnastics. Travesties was set in Zurich during the First World War and featured Lenin, James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; This actor’s brilliant, fragile and deliberately clever plays were sometimes compared to Stoppard’s.

Later in his career, he similarly wrote Hapgood, a play about espionage and quantum physics, and Arcadia, a play about mathematics, thermodynamics, literature, and landscape gardening. He claimed that he wrote plays to discover what he really thought as well as to explore his existing ideas.

He also wrote for radio. If You Are Satisfied Frank imagined the talking watch as a real woman talking live; his inner monologue was completely at odds with the deathly repetition of the endless intonation “on the third beat…”. Albert Bridge was about a man who painted a bridge with philosophy and mathematics mixed into it.

Over the years, his writings became more serious, more political, and more empathetic.

“I’ve gradually learned that games work best if you let them warm the blood a little and not just be exciting witty exchanges,” he told Joan Bakewell in an illuminating 2002 interview.

“It is the humanity of the characters that gives theater the possibility of being a great art.”

So Night and Day was about journalism and its purposes; The Real Thing was about love and infidelity and starred Felicity Kendal, with whom Stoppard had left his second wife, the doctor and publisher Miriam Stoppard.

Every Good Boy Deserves Kindness featured a symphony orchestra alongside actors in a savage satire that dramatized the plight of Soviet dissidents confined to mental hospitals.

“I have no symptoms, I have ideas,” a patient says at one point.

His doctor replies, “Your views are your symptoms. Your disease is dissent.” This was the kind of paradox Stoppard loved to explore.

The Shore of Utopia was a massive trilogy about the 19th-century Russian liberal thinker Alexander Herzen: coolly received at the National Theater in London, it was a huge success in New York.

And Rock’n’Roll was about the suffocating oppression of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

His plays demonstrated considerable wisdom.

“I always wanted to know about a lot of things, but not particularly in depth,” he told Joan Bakewell.

“I love facts, I love knowledge, I love having broad interests. There are various ways to describe such a person; amateur can be in one way and wisdom can be in another way.”

“To write a play, I have to capture that fixity, that charge, that energy that comes from being really, really interested in a small area – it could be a scientific thing, it could be a philosophical thing, it could be a historical thing – but a really unforced, uncontainable fascination with something, then everything else becomes a play.”

Sir Tom was both a successful screenwriter and a playwright. Many of his plays were first written for television, most notably Professional Foul, which emerged from his association with the Czech dissident movement Charter 77.

He adapted Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat for television, co-wrote Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy Brazil, provided much of the dialogue in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (though he is uncredited), and adapted John Le Carre, Tolstoy, and Robert Harris for the screen. And in 1998, he shared a best screenplay Oscar for his contribution to Shakespeare in Love.

He was knighted in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000. He married his third wife, heiress and television producer Sabrina Guinness, in 2014.

He claimed that the writing process did not get easier as he got older.

“Every time I go on this leaky boat, I do the ridiculous exercise of trying to remember how I got my hands on the last game. And I never do,” he told an interviewer.

“I don’t remember now how I got into Rock’n’Roll, I wish I could, I would do it again. But since there is nothing to continue, I just read the newspapers, chat with people, hang out and worry before going to sleep.”