“Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.”
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
Tom Stoppard, the "apostle of detachment," is getting in touch with his emotions: sadness, mortality, melancholy, vulnerability …
~ Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
“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
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
“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
Died: 29 November 2025 (age 88 years), Dorset, United Kingdom
Spouse: Sabrina Guinness (m. 2014), Miriam Stoppard (m. 1972–1992) · See more
Children: Ed Stoppard, Will Stoppard, Oliver Stoppard, Barnaby Stoppard
"Stoppardian" became a term used to describe works that employ wit and comedy while addressing complex philosophical ideas.
His most prominent works include:
- 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.
Screenwriting Career
Stoppard was also a highly successful screenwriter, known for his work on numerous acclaimed films.
- 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.
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.
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright
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, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter were producing some of their best work, and the generation of David Hare and David Edgar 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 and Jumpers, 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”.
Tom Stoppard’s Luck American Conservative
Drawing comparisons to the greatest of dramatists, he entwined erudition with imagination in stage works that won accolades on both sides of the Atlantic.
Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
The death was announced on social media by United Agents, which represented him. No other details were provided.
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.
Academy Award-Winning Playwright Tom Stoppard Has Died Stoppard won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love.”Academy Award-Winning Playwright Tom Stoppard Has Died Stoppard won an Academy Award for the screenplay for 1998’s “Shakespeare In Love.”