[Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) is
one of my favorite playwrights. Ever
since I first saw one of his plays, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead, in 1969 or 1970, I have loved his work. His death on 29 November was a shock.
[I first experienced Stoppard’s work while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base, where I was posted from December 1969 to February 1970.
[The third play I saw at ATL knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays.
[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then. I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Later, I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.
[I returned to graduate
school in 1984, and for a class in theatrical structure, I wrote the course
paper on R&G; it’s posted on Rick
On Theater as “Theatrical Structure“ (15 and 18 February 2011). I haven’t caught all of Stoppard’s plays, but
many of them have been part of my theater experience.]
“SIR TOM STOPPARD
OBITUARY:
[The obituary notice for Tom Stoppard in The Times (London) ran without a byline on 29 November 2025. It’s posted online at Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright. (Readers will note that the typography and spelling in this posting, because it is from a British newspaper, follows a different standard than we usually see here the U.S.)]
A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence
With his Jim Morrison mane and Mick Jagger pout, Tom Stoppard looked more like a brooding rock star than one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed and commercially popular playwrights.
Although he came to prominence at a time of excitement in the theatre when John Osborne [1929-94], Arnold Wesker [1932-2016] and Harold Pinter [1930-2008] were producing some of their best work, and the generation of David Hare [b. 1947] and David Edgar [b. 1948] was emerging, his writing and his concerns were utterly distinctive and personal. And just as every cultured person more or less knows what is meant by Pinteresque, so the adjective Stoppardian entered the language as a shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence.
Incorporating multiple timelines and visual humour, his work was generally optimistic and good-natured at a time when others were investigating squalor, degradation, silence and anomie. “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours,” he explained.
He rarely aimed for realism, least of all the gritty kind. His theatre is a place of carnival, where the extraordinary happens and ideas are taken to absurd logical extremes, and he had a wonderful ability to combine disparate elements beneath a dazzling surface. In his early career he was criticised, after the immense success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead [premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966; London, 1967; Broadway debut, 1967] and Jumpers [1972], for failing to portray people convincingly and for the lack of social conscience. His reply was that much of his dialogue was “simply stuff which I’ve ping-ponged between me and myself”.
“I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown,” he said, “and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”
Accordingly, his younger years were amusing and productive, but as he grew older part of him was determined to write about darker matters, and to investigate what he really thought and felt. He was genuinely interested in the life of his times, but in its intellectual rather than its social manifestations.
For his own part Stoppard affected indifference to his high reputation. In 2010, when asked what he thought Stoppardian meant, he said “another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence”.
He was born Tomas Straussler [Sträussler; his family was among the many Czechs of German descent] in 1937, the younger son of Eugen, a doctor employed by Bata shoes, and Martha in Zlin in Czechoslovakia. The exotic way he rolled his Rs as he spoke hinted at his Bohemian origins. The family moved to Singapore two years later to escape the threat of Nazism [Germany occupied Czechoslovakia on 16 March 1938], only to find themselves in danger again, in 1942, from the Japanese invasion [8-15 February 1942]. His mother took him and his brother Petr to India [a British colony until 1947] while his father stayed behind, only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid. Martha rarely spoke of any of these events and it was only years later that Stoppard discovered that his family was Jewish and that most of his relatives, including his four grandparents, had perished in the death camps — a discovery he would reckon with in his play Leopoldstadt [2020].
After the war, his mother married a British army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard — who, according to Tom, “believed with Cecil Rhodes that to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life’’ — and returned to England with her two sons, who took their stepfather’s name. Tom went to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, the latter of which, Pocklington, he hated.
He left school at 17 to become a reporter for the Western Daily Press [Bristol]. Four years later he moved to the Bristol Evening World, where he stayed until 1960. It was during this period that he worked, he claimed, as the only motoring correspondent who could not drive. “I used to review the upholstery,” he said. He was also a second-string theatre critic.
He continued to work as a freelance journalist until 1963, when his first play, A Walk on the Water, was produced on television. He then devoted himself to full-time writing, which meant living in some poverty — though not without flamboyance — until, in 1967, his fortunes were transformed by the popularity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play’s premiere had been given by an Oxford University drama group at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year, and after a favourable review it was snapped up by Kenneth Tynan for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, where it stayed in repertory for four years. It was also seen on Broadway and in translation around the world.
The task of translation must have been made harder by the piece’s dependence upon recognition of Shakespeare’s lines. The play is a kind of backstage Hamlet, in which the leading players become bit parts and the minor characters take the key roles, finding, as in the tragedy, that their world has been turned inside out. A further clever conceit is Stoppard’s identification of Samuel Beckett’s [1906-89] Waiting for Godot [French premiere: 1953, Paris; English language: 1955, London; U.S. premiere: January 1956, Miami; Broadway: April 1956] as a Hamlet for the 20th century. The dialogue of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a comic take on that of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, which had been the theatrical revelation of the previous decade; and just as these anti-heroes are assimilated by Stoppard, so are the enigmatic Prince and the elusive Mr Godot.
Beckett never saw or read Stoppard’s play, but the next best thing was a friendly telegram from another playwright, Pinter. It was signed “PINTA” and Stoppard recalled: “I thought that in some curious way it was connected with the Milk Marketing Board.”
[The Milk Marketing Board was a producer-run product marketing board, established to control milk production and distribution in the United Kingdom 1933. It guaranteed a minimum price for milk producers until it was dissolved in 2002.
[The only explanation I can find for Stoppard’s quip about “PINTA” for Pinter’s name is a reference to the Milk Marketing Board’s memorable advertising campaigns in the 1950s and onwards. Slogans included “full of natural goodness,” “is your man getting enough?,” and “milk’s gotta lotta bottle.” Another slogan of the era was “drinka pinta milka day.”]
In 1968 A Walk on the Water was recycled for the stage as Enter a Free Man, a minor piece, and The Real Inspector Hound opened at the Criterion Theatre in the West End. Inspector Hound is an ingenious satire on the traditional murder mystery, in which two theatre critics become entangled. Stoppard pokes fond fun at the mechanics of the genre, as when Mrs Drudge answers a phone she happens to be dusting with the ultra-informative words: “Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring.”
Three years later, the one-act After Magritte showed Stoppard’s talents for wordplay and for brilliantly surreal but infallibly logical plotting. These were to reach their height in 1972 in Jumpers, a play about a moral philosopher wrestling to demonstrate that there are objective values while his wife, a musical comedy star, suffers a breakdown and his university becomes a sort of intellectual gymnasium.
At one point, for entirely evident reasons, the philosopher answers the door to a policeman while covered in shaving foam and holding a tortoise, with the words: “I’m sorry, I was expecting a psychiatrist.”
Jumpers was a huge success, being at once entertaining and cerebral. In Stoppard’s rollicking style it addresses a profound question and the author’s sympathies are clearly with the flailing philosopher, but the treatment itself is facetious even when Stoppard is deploring the unseriousness of trendy academia. Like most of his pieces it is something of an exercise. Very often, Stoppard’s lines are designed for a palpable but momentary effect: in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for instance, Rosencrantz idly muses on the growth of the fingernails after death solely as a cue for the convulsingly theatrical line: “The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all.”
Between major plays, Stoppard wrote one-acters, scripts for radio and television (including a version of Three Men in a Boat, starring Michael Palin [BBC, 1975]), film scripts (including Graham Greene’s The Human Factor [1979] and JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun [1987]), and translations and adaptations (Federico Garcia Lorca [Spanish; 1898-1936], Arthur Schnitzler [Austrian; 1862-1931], Anton Chekhov [Russian; 1860-1904]). He also contributed anonymously to Steven Spielberg scripts, which were sent to him privately. Some of these seemed to be chips from the workshop, but all contained memorably hilarious lines.
His next stage play was Travesties (1975), in which [Vladimir] Lenin [1870-1924], the Dadaist Tristan Tzara [1896-1963] and James Joyce [1882-1941] meet in Zurich during the First World War and become involved in a production of [Oscar Wilde’s] The Importance of Being Earnest. Again, Stoppard was spurred or enabled to write by a classic work, already familiar to his audience, around which he played his variations and cerebral games.
Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) also used this technique, spinning ideas (this time out of [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951; Austro-British philosopher], about the nature of language) around an immediately recognisable framework. When he attempted something freestanding, as in Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) or Night and Day (1978), the results were less happy. In 1980 he admitted that some of the excitement of the theatre had worn thin, saying: “When I started, I wrote a play because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright.” He was by now one of the most successful in the world, and in 1979 he became “lord” of Iver Grove, a Palladian-style house in Buckinghamshire.
In that year he also wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with full on-stage orchestra, with music by André Previn [1929-2019]. This remarkable hybrid concerned the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and featured a sane man put in a mental hospital for saying that sane men were being put in mental hospitals. This was the kind of ramifying conundrum on which Stoppard had always thrived, but now the comedy was poignant because the pressing truth was so tragic.
Stoppard had now exhausted the vein of travesty, and his significant output slowed considerably, with perhaps a really good new play emerging each decade. One answer to his dependency problem was to adapt little-known foreign work. Undiscovered Country (1979) was from Arthur Schnitzler; On the Razzle (1981), at the National Theatre with Felicity Kendal playing the lead, was a sublimely funny, fast-moving version of a comedy by Johann Nestroy [Austrian; 1801-62]. Rough Crossing, at the National in 1984, was adapted from Ferenc Molnar [Hungarian; 1878-1952], and concerned the writing of a Broadway musical set on a ship by a composer and its two stars as they are sailing to New York. This was Stoppard’s “sine qua nonchalance” at its best.
His most substantial plays of the 1980s and 1990s were The Real Thing, Arcadia and The Invention of Love. The title of The Real Thing (1982) referred to the sincerity or otherwise of art and love, but also contained a defence of language used well which may be taken as an attack on the use of blunt propaganda in the theatre by some of Stoppard’s more radical contemporaries.
Whether the play itself was the real thing or merely a tale of adultery among theatre folk, with Stoppard’s fizzing language disguising some fairly trite comparisons, is hard to say.
Reality took a bow shortly afterwards when Stoppard and his leading lady, Kendal, left their respective spouses for each other. He would later describe her as his muse. She starred successively in On the Razzle, Jumpers, Hapgood [1988], Arcadia and Indian Ink [1995] (which drew on her early years in India) at the National or in the West End.
Arcadia (1993) was classic Stoppard: a story of love and literature, philosophy and coincidence. Ranging from the age of Byron [English poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, 1788-1824] to that of chaos theory, it combined the suspense of The Aspern Papers [a novella by Henry James (1843-1916), originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888; two film adaptations on 2010 and 2018] with the excitement of the most speculative modern science. “It’s the best possible time to be alive,” declares one character in the present, “when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Like his characters, Stoppard was dancing for joy at what lesser minds would find a frightening prospect. For him, the infinite permutations of life were a cause for celebration.
The Invention of Love (1997) was a far more sombre piece: a profile of AE Housman [1859-1936; English classical scholar and poet] as a classicist who has perhaps failed to seize the day. Once again, Stoppard had done his research, and transformed it into something much more remarkable than a critical biography. Set on the banks of the Isis and the Styx, the play had coincidental appearances in Stoppard’s most elastic manner by Oscar Wilde [1854-1900; Irish author, poet and playwright], Benjamin Jowett [1817-93; English writer and classical scholar] and Frank Harris [1856-1931; Irish-American editor, writer, journalist, and publisher]; yet the staging was unrelievedly drab. There was pathos and an impassioned speech about the importance of truth, and the run was a sell-out, but audiences probably left the theatre knowing more than they cared to about the editing of Latin poetry.
Stoppard’s care for English had something in common with Housman’s care for Latin. It was not his first language — he had spoken only Czech until he was taught English at school in India at the age of five — and he seemed to interrogate language rather than merely use it. Of all his interests, ranging from cricket to mathematics, the tricks of language was the most absorbing.
Between stage work, Stoppard continued writing for the cinema and won an Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a witty and entertaining piece in which the young Will (Joseph Fiennes) falls for Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant.
Stoppard shared the writing credit with an American screenwriter, Marc Norman [b. 1941], who had the idea for the film in the 1980s. Norman’s draft screenplay failed to impress and Stoppard was brought in to improve it.
In 2002 came his most ambitious stage work to date, The Coast of Utopia, a sprawling trilogy about Russia’s 19th-century romantic exiles, Alexander Herzen [1812-70; Russian writer and thinker], Ivan Turgenev [1818-83; Russian writer, poet, and playwright] and Mikhail Bakunin [1814-76; Russian revolutionary anarchist], and their intellectual and personal preoccupations. Directed by Trevor Nunn [b. 1940] at the National, it had a mixed reception, with even favourable critics finding it uneven and flawed. Revived five years later at the Lincoln Center in New York, it enjoyed a decent run and won seven Tony awards.
In 2006 the Royal Court asked Stoppard for a play to mark the 50th anniversary of the English Stage Company. As Stoppard had no previous connection with the theatre, he was a controversial choice, but Rock ‘n’ Roll was good enough to win the opposition over. Partly it was about a Czech rock group’s ability to challenge an autocratic regime through its music, but it was also a wider discourse on liberty, in Britain as much as in communist eastern Europe.
He spent three years, more or less, working on the well-received TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End [2012] but then he seemed to slip back into writer’s block until 2015 when he produced The Hard Problem, his first script in nine years. The Guardian’s critic thought it suffered from “information overload”, while the Telegraph deemed it a “major disappointment”. If he was upset he hid it well behind a façade of levity. When asked whether he found it difficult to talk about work in progress, he said: “Not at all. I’m normally so thrilled to have had an idea at all I tell everyone, even people who have no interest in hearing.”
Four years later it was announced that he had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community in Vienna from 1899 onwards, which he described as his most personal play. It culminates in 1955 with an Anglicised schoolboy who is confronted with a family tree showing all his relatives who were butchered in Europe.
Stoppard’s only novel was Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), which he claimed to have written in two days.
He won innumerable theatrical awards, and was appointed CBE [Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire] in 1978, knighted in 1997 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. He gave a number of academic lectures, but they were amusements and insights into his own practice rather than revelations about other writers.
His first wife (1965-72) was Jose Ingle, a nurse, and his second (1972-92) was Miriam Moore-Robinson, the agony aunt, broadcaster and anti-smoking campaigner (Stoppard was a dedicated smoker). There were two sons by each marriage. Oliver is a postman in Norfolk, having abandoned a doctorate in physics for a simpler life; Barnaby runs a restaurant in London; Ed is a successful Shakespearean actor and Will manages his wife, the celebrated violinist Linzi Stoppard. It was while married to Dr Miriam Stoppard, as she was better known, that he embarked on his affair with Kendal. That ended in 1998 and, 16 years later, he married the television producer and heiress Sabrina Guinness, a one-time It girl who had dated Prince Charles [now King Charles III]. They lived in Dorset.
Stoppard always claimed that he wasn’t engaged enough politically to be able to know where to place himself, on the left or right, yet he and Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1979-90] had a soft spot for each other and he once attended a literary dinner held in her honour. Of his politics he said he felt a bit sheepish. It did not stop him becoming one of the founders of the political magazine Standpoint in 2008 [ceased publication in 2021], just as his own lack of formal university education did not stop him becoming a visiting professor in theatre at Oxford in 2017.
He couldn’t wait to be out of education aged 17. “It was years and years before I felt I missed out on something,” he said. “I began to have certain kinds of regret about it. There are probably aspects of the autodidact’s life that compensate. The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.”
A sense of insecurity and a tendency towards self-deprecation may explain his unwillingness to help posterity by keeping a diary, or indeed most of his papers. “I keep some letters,” he said. “I have a couple from Laurence Olivier [1907-89; English actor and director] and one from John Steinbeck [1902-68; American writer], but the rest of my life I destroy as I go along.”
And perhaps insecurity, or at least a nervousness about being exposed as an intellectual impostor, may also account for what he called his cheap side, his love of cheap gags: “The days of the digital watch are numbered,” as one of his characters says, or “if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”
His sense of humour even extended to his own obituary. Asked in later life what he imagined the first line of his would be, he replied: “Tom Stoppard, the father of Ed Stoppard, has died.”
* *
* *
“THE GIFT TOM
STOPPARD GAVE TO ME
by Talya Zax
[Tayla Zax’s article was posted on the Forward (New York City) website on 29 November 2025, the day of the playwright’s death.]
The great British Jewish playwright asked profound questions about what it means to live a significant life
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — ”it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
[Talya Zax is a culture critic, journalist, and editor based in Brooklyn. She’s the Forward’s opinion editor. In addition to Forward, her criticism and reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the website Literary Hub.]
* *
* *
“HIS WORDS WERE
ABLAZE WITH ENERGY AND URGENCY”
by Ben Brantley
[While the New York Times published Stoppard’s obituary, “Dramatist Whose Wit Put a New Spin on Shakespeare, and Love” by Bruce Weber, in its print edition on 1 December (“Tom Stoppard, Award-Winning Playwright of Witty Drama, Dies at 88” online), it ran several companion pieces that day and the next. On that same day, in “The Arts” (sec. C), Elizabeth Vincentelli published “Tom Stoppard’s Imprint Is Enduring on Film” (“Movies Written by Tom Stoppard to Stream”).
[The next day, in the arts section, the Times ran Marc Tracy’s “Final Play Confronts a Revelation” (“When Tom Stoppard Confronted His Background in His Final Play”) and Eric Grode’s “Skilled in Screenwriting as Well as Stagecraft” (“Tom Stoppard Wrote Dialogue for Indiana Jones and Obi-Wan Kenobi”), another piece on Stoppard’s screenwriting.
[In that same arts section, Ben Brantley had “His Words Were Ablaze With Energy and Urgency” (“The Language of Tom Stoppard, Ablaze With Energy and Urgency,“ posted on 29 November 2025 and updated on 30 November). It’s former Times drama reviewer Brantley’s analysis of Stoppard’s stage language.]
Tom Stoppard embraced big questions and wrestled language into bold shapes.
On a sticky August day in London 23 years ago, I walked into the Royal National Theater with glazed eyes, a heavy tread and what felt like an unconquerable weariness. I was fresh — or rather stale — off a plane from New York, and before me lay nine-plus hours of people with unpronounceable names talking about Russian history.
A picture of me, unidentified, appeared in The Evening Standard the next day, sitting in the audience behind a reporter who was writing about how to survive the event in question: the marathon performance of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about the ideas behind the Russian Revolution, ‘‘The Coast of Utopia,’’ which was officially opening that day. I looked close to dead.
That was taken before 11 a.m. If I had been photographed again that night, walking along the Thames 12 hours later, you would have seen an improbably energized man, who looked as if he’d just fallen in love. Wouldn’t you know it? Stoppard’s words had cured me of terminal jet lag.
I should have known that would be the case, of course. The language of Stoppard — the Czech-born British dramatist who has died at 88 — has always affected me like an intravenous cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins.
He may well have been the most prolix playwright in the English language since George Bernard Shaw, as he wrestled with subjects that were, if not arcane, then unusually academic by most standards. The play that made his name, ‘‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’’ (1966), retold ‘‘Hamlet’’ from the point of view of two inescapably marginal characters in that tragedy. And his penultimate work, ‘‘The Hard Problem’’ (2015), debated the nature of consciousness itself.
Such topics were analyzed in a thick, continuous flow of theorizing given polysyllabic life that, examined dispassionately and out of context on the page, might indeed make the eyelids grow heavier. Dispassionate, however, is not how I ever felt watching a Stoppard play.
That’s because Stoppard invested words with an energy and an urgency that were less purely intellectual than they were existential. Not for nothing did his 1972 play ‘‘Jumpers’’ — about physics, metaphysics and the elusiveness of moral absolutes — feature a supporting cast of bouncing, bending gymnasts.
Words, for him, were confounding, exhilarating, form-shifting phenomena that we are all forever trying to wrestle into coherent shape. And actors in his plays over the years — John Wood, Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Diana Rigg, Tom Hollander, Jeremy Irons, Jennifer Ehle — allowed us to feel the tragicomic heat that emanated from such wrestling matches.
For words were what we — and particularly he — had to work with in giving order to the glorious, irreducible chaos that is life. He loved his words to the point of mania and yet fretted over their inadequacy, making the mere act of speech seem somehow both heroic and doomed. He caused words to explode like fireworks, dazzling us with their bright, multicolored patterns.
Stoppard also would not let us forget that such fireworks were ephemeral displays that faded against the night sky. But as he had his version of Oscar Wilde say in ‘‘The Invention of Love,’’ about the donnish poet A.E. Housman, ‘‘Better a fallen rocket, than never a burst of light.’’
I fell in love with Stoppard’s work in late adolescence, when I was easily seduced by cloud-scraping cleverness and appalled by cheap sentimentality. (The one we discussed most feverishly in college was an English major’s teen dream: ‘‘Travesties,’’ which imagined an encounter, centered on an amateur production of Wilde’s ‘‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’’ among James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin.) I made the mistake, then, of subscribing to the common view that Stoppard was a cerebral being, who concerned himself more with matters of the mind than the heart.
Yet the more I saw of Stoppard’s work — and I reviewed more productions of his plays during my years as a critic than I can count — the more I realized how misguided this point of view was. And it wasn’t just the plays that were proclaimed as voyages into the more personal realms of semi-autobiography: the midcareer ‘‘The Real Thing’’ (1982), about an inhibited playwright who learns to get in touch with his feelings, and the magisterial ‘‘Leopoldstadt’’ (2020), his last complete play, in which he reckoned with the legacy of his Jewish roots and the Holocaust.
All of Stoppard’s plays, in performance, were likely to bring tears to my eyes, including the seemingly esoteric and hyper-intellectual ‘‘Travesties,’’ ‘‘Jumpers’’ and the time-traveling ‘‘Arcadia,’’ a sort of academic mystery play set in a past and present shadowed by an unseen Lord Byron.
That’s because of the inevitably thwarted but valiant and vital attempts of their characters to solve the mysteries that confront them and us daily. These embrace not only the really big questions — the hard problem of consciousness or the mechanical clockwork of the universe — but also the issues of simply how to be in a world that keeps changing its rules on us and of the impossibility of fully knowing another human being.
Yet if the great conundrums could never be solved, Stoppard never discounted the mystical beauty of the attempts to do so. When I heard Stoppard had died, the first image that materialized in my mind was of Cusack, playing a cancer-riddled classics professor in ‘‘Rock ‘n’ Roll,’’ making an impassioned argument against materialism: ‘‘I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.’’
I found this declaration comforting. The essence of Stoppard’s words will continue to blaze long after his death. Fireworks may be only for the moment, but they leave traces of light that are never quite extinguished in the memory.
[Ben Brantley was the chief theater reviewer of the New York Times for more than 20 years. He wrote more than 2,500 reviews over 27 years beginning in 1993, filing regularly from London as well as New York. He retired from regular reviewing in 2020.
[I often disagreed with
Brantley’s assessments of plays we both saw.
There was more than one occasion when I wondered if he had even seen the
same play that I had. But reading his
sense of Stoppard’s dramaturgy, I can’t help but feel we received this playwright
the same way.
[“Tom Stoppard Remembered” is being posted in two parts, with Part 1 above. The second part, which consists of a single essay by the playwright, himself, from 1999, will be posted on Sunday, 7 December. I invite ROTters to come back to this site then for the completion of this short series in honor of the renowned British dramatist.]
