Tom Stoppard, the great modern dramatist of history, science, politics, art, and love, is dead. He was 88... The Guardian... The Times... Mark Damazer... Helen Shaw... Michael Billington... ... more »
It was one of the plays -Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - that Tom wrote that broke ice with my better half …
To be alive during Tom’s lifetime has been one of the soulful bohemian blessings
As fellow playwright Simon Gray once said, “It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except perhaps his looks, his talents, his money and his luck.”
The philosophy in Tom Stoppard’s plays — an appreciation of the playwright, who died on November 29th
Tom Stoppard: Information is light
“Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.” ~ Tom Stoppard
Tomáš Sträussler, 1937–2025) was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter
Born: 3 July 1937, Zlín, Czechia
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead(1966): His breakout play that places two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet at the center of the action, exploring themes of chance and mortality.
- Jumpers (1972): A murder mystery that satirizes academic philosophy and moral values.
- Travesties (1974): An exploration of art and revolution, using a "Wildean" structure to imagine interactions between Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara in WWI Zürich.
- The Real Thing (1982): A meta-theatrical play about love, art, and adultery, which won a Tony Award for Best Play.
- Arcadia (1993): Juxtaposes 19th-century Romanticism with 20th-century science and chaos theory, widely considered one of his finest works.
- Leopoldstadt (2020): His final, deeply personal play chronicling a Viennese Jewish family across half a century, dealing with the Holocaust and his own rediscovered Jewish heritage.
- He co-wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love(1998).
- He also contributed to scripts for films like Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade(1989), often as an uncredited script doctor.
In 1982 play The Real Thing, is a quote spoken by the character Henry, a playwright, who may or may not represent some of Stoppard’s own attitudes. Criticising another character, Henry says:
He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech … Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate politics or justice; but if you don’t know this, then you’re acting on a mistake.
The actor, who starred as a Marxist academic in the acclaimed 2006 play at the Royal Court, remembers an astonishing writer of ideas and elegance
As a Script Doctor, Tom Stoppard
Was Stealthily Erudite
The playwright won an Academy Award for “Shakespeare in Love.” for the likes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Indiana Jones.
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.Michael BaumProfessor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCLSource Bsky Harry Wallop Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities UCL
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Artist”
Stoppard’s screenplay was remarkably faithful to Greene’s original, apart from a scene he said he had particularly enjoyed writing, which gave a wink to 007.
One of the characters is bemoaning the fact he never goes to the cinema: “Ian [Fleming] took me to one of his once. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it – fella kept killing people with gadgets and being kissed by amazing-looking girls who then tried to kill him – and all the time he was trying to save the world from some foreigner in a submarine I think it was.”
That scene would, sadly, remain on the cutting room floor.
— T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Artist”
Stoppard’s screenplay was remarkably faithful to Greene’s original, apart from a scene he said he had particularly enjoyed writing, which gave a wink to 007.
One of the characters is bemoaning the fact he never goes to the cinema: “Ian [Fleming] took me to one of his once. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it – fella kept killing people with gadgets and being kissed by amazing-looking girls who then tried to kill him – and all the time he was trying to save the world from some foreigner in a submarine I think it was.”
That scene would, sadly, remain on the cutting room floor.
A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright
Drawing comparisons to the greatest of dramatists, he entwined erudition with imagination in stage works that won accolades on both sides of the Atlantic.
Very sad to hear that Tom Stoppard has passed away; as longtime readers know, I was a great admirer of his work. See, for example, the obituaries at the BBC, The Guardian, and The New York Times (presumably paywalled).
Quite a few of his plays are under review at the complete review:
- Arcadia
- The Coast of Utopia
- Enter a Free Man
- Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
- Hapgood
- The Invention of Love
- Jumpers
- Night and Day
- Professional Foul
- The Real Thing
- Rock 'n' Roll
- Mel Gussow's Conversations with Stoppard
- The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. K.E.Kelly
- Ira Nadel's Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard (also: Tom Stoppard: A Life)
- John Fleming on Stoppard's Theatre
Lee makes use of the drama in Stoppard’s life in telling her story. She has also been given access to his personal letters, and she demonstrates a novelist’s skill in depicting the complexities of her many characters. This includes not just Stoppard but his three wives, three siblings, four children, and many others. Lee is also a sensitive critic, and she has a deft touch in noting when Stoppard’s work has fallen flat, as with his convoluted spy drama “Hapgood.”
