Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88 | Tom Stoppard
Playwright Tom Stoppard, who dazzled the theater world for decades with his humorous wisdom, has died at the age of 88.
A distinguished writer from all disciplines who deserves his own epithet – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he reveled in the most unexpected of juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); Landscape gardening and chaos theory in the early 19th century in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics, and Sappho’s love poem in Rock ‘n’ Roll (2006).
A new Stoppard play has become an international event since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, featuring two unknown Shakespearean courtiers, appeared on the Edinburgh border in 1966 and was developed by the National Theatre.
He has combined more than 30 plays for the theater with a steady stream of work for television and radio and screenplays including John le Carré’s Russia House, an adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and a co-credit on the Oscar-winning screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.
But his influence went much further than his on-screen credits: He was the go-to writer for blockbusters that needed some excitement and polish (including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the Star Wars adventure Revenge of the Sith). Steven Spielberg once dragged him out of the shower with an urgent phone call to discuss a problem with Schindler’s List.
Stoppard was married three times and was famous for his sociability. Playwright Simon Gray captured something of his glamorous life when he quipped: “It’s actually one of Tom’s achievements that people never envy him anything other than his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. To be so enviable without being enviable is quite enviable when you think about it.”
His early childhood was not very auspicious. Born in Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Straussler was not yet two years old when his Jewish parents fled the Nazi occupation in 1939 to Singapore. Three years later, he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother, leaving his father to face a deadly confrontation with the Japanese occupation as an army medical officer. After his father’s death, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British major who adopted the children and brought the family back to England after the war.
Stoppard left school at 17 to become a journalist, initially for the Western Daily Press in Bristol. After dabbling in short radio plays for several years, his first stage play was selected for theater in Hamburg and television in England. Moving to London, he wrote theater reviews under the pseudonym William Boot, inspired by Evelyn Waugh; Later, a Ford Foundation grant enabled him to escape to Berlin and devote himself to the idea that would become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Although the highbrow pyrotechnics and daring theatricality of his early work have led some to view him as more intellect than heart, that began to change with The Real Thing, a meditation on the pain of infidelity and the precarious relationship between art and life that Michael Billington lists among the 101 best plays ever written. The film, which premiered in the West End in 1982, starred Felicity Kendall and Roger Rees, and these roles were reprized on Broadway by Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.
He was at his peak for 15 years after The Real Thing. According to biographer Hermione Lee, Stoppard thought Arcadia (1993) was probably his best play, while The Invention of Love (1997), about the poet AE Housman, was his favourite. OnlyHapgood (1988) ran afoul of the old accusation that it was too clever by half with its combination of spy story and particle theory, but it was widely felt to have been vindicated by its revival at the Hampstead theater in 2015.
For all his personal sociability, Stoppard was a loner as a writer and did not share the left-leaning political sympathies of his playwright contemporaries. Describing himself as a “timid libertarian” and an “honorary Englishman”, he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and signed a letter in support of the US invasion of Grenada in 1984. He was awarded a CBE in 1978 and knighted in 1997. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN Pinter prize for his “determination to tell it like it is”.
He frequently returned to his Central European roots with works depicting the anatomy of the cold war, including Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977), commissioned by André Previn for a full orchestra performance on stage, and the spectacular teleplay Professional Foul, which premiered the same year. The second was dedicated to his friend Václav Havel, who was in and out of prison at the time.
He was in his 50s before he discovered the truth about his Jewish roots, and he was in his 80s when that knowledge turned into his late masterpiece Leopoldstadt, about a once-prosperous Viennese family from 1899 to 1955.
