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 has 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.
Among his best known plays are “The Real Thing” (1982), a Tony Award-winning contemporary tale about the marriage of a playwright and an actress that considers the intersection of love and literature; the prolix and ribald comedy “Arcadia” (1993), an Olivier Award winner (the British equivalent of the Tonys), which, set on an English estate both in 1809 and nearly 200 years later, concerns the human desire to acquire knowledge and the ways in which the most well-educated people misuse, misinterpret or misunderstand it; and “The Coast of Utopia,” a trilogy devoted to an excitable Russian intelligentsia in 19th-century Czarist Russia, which premiered in London in 2002 and won the Tony Award on Broadway — the award cited all three parts — in 2007.
A voracious reader but otherwise remarkably undereducated for a writer of such voluminous knowledge and understanding, Mr. Stoppard found both inspiration and provocation in his literary predecessors. His work alluded to, commented on or borrowed from classic works of literature and philosophy, from the Greeks and Romans to Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel. He often drew on consequential historical events and real-life figures of intellectual power and influence.
A complete obituary will be published soon.
Bruce Weber retired in 2016 after 27 years at The Times. During the last eight he was an obituary writer. He is at work on a biography of the novelist E.L. Doctorow.
The post Tom Stoppard, Award-Winning Playwright of Witty Drama, Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
