Tom Stoppard, a Czech-born British dramatist whose intellectually challenging and verbally dazzling works included some of the most acclaimed and oft-performed plays of the past half-century, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
United Agents, which represented Mr. Stoppard, announced his death Nov. 29, but did not state a cause.
Mr. Stoppard’s most popular works — among them his Tony Award-winning plays “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing,” “The Coast of Utopia” trilogy, and “Leopoldstadt” — explored political, artistic and scientific questions, often in settings that permitted mash-ups of high and low culture. Topics ranged from Fermat to Pink Floyd to Sigmund Freud, and even his most demanding works were filigreed with comic flourishes.
In “Travesties” (1974), a British envoy stages an Oscar Wilde play in Zurich with a group of drunken louts who turn out to be the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Irish novelist James Joyce and the Dada-ist poet Tristan Tzara, all of whom had been in the Swiss city in 1917.
His characters tended to debate, but rarely solve, philosophical problems. He once told television host Charlie Rose that he became a playwright because he was undecided about most issues and that constructing dialogue, with characters taking opposite points of view, “is the best way to contradict yourself.”
His ambivalence may have resulted from a confusing childhood: His family fled Czechoslovakia during World War II, then passed through Singapore and Darjeeling, India, before settling in England. He referred to himself as a “bounced Czech.”
His first big success, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” (1966), was, according to New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, “a very funny play about death,” its plot akin to “a mousetrap seen from the other side of the cheese.”
Its protagonists are minor characters from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” trying to interpret the events swirling around them. Though generally confused, they stumble onto certain important truths, a bit elliptically, as when Rosencrantz muses, “Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”
Much of Ms. Stoppard’s humor involved confusion over people’s names. At times even the dimwitted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forget which of them is which. Guildenstern is grateful that they have only two choices; otherwise, he says, their search would make them resemble “two blind men looting a bazaar for their own portraits.”
Mr. Stoppard contended with his own questions of identity as he transitioned from Tomáš Straussler (in Czechoslovakia) to Tommy Straussler (in India) to Tom Stoppard (in England). Though the adult Mr. Stoppard seemed quintessentially British — he was an avid cricket player and was knighted in 1997 — he said he often felt like an outsider. “I find I put a foot wrong — it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history — and suddenly I’m there naked,” he told the Guardian in 2008.
Yet Mr. Stoppard was a devotee of English culture before he became a part of English culture. A film he co-authored, “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), may be the most popular work ever about England’s greatest writer, grossing nearly $300 million. A 16th-century romcom, it has Shakespeare falling for a would-be actress while writing a play called “Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate’s Daughter.” Love conquers, if not all, at least that star-crossed title. Mr. Stoppard and his co-writer, Marc Norman, won an Oscar for their original screenplay.
After the success of “Shakespeare in Love,” Mr. Stoppard wrote more films as well as many radio and TV programs. But the theater was always his home, with each new play requiring a year or more of research into the arcana of daunting subjects, including quantum mechanics.
“While I’m writing a play I’m reclusive and bad tempered and absent-minded,” he told Rose. The next stage — the collaborative process of going from page to stage — was more enjoyable. The arrival of audiences, however, could be disconcerting. “You can think of it as a novel,” he said, “but all the readers are in one room at the same time, and you have to listen to their reaction.”
Some found his material too intellectual, others not intellectual enough. His contribution, rather, was to the art of theater.
“Jumpers” (1972) was described by theater critic Benedict Nightingale, writing in the New York Times, as a play “in which people variously perform gymnastics, dangle off chandeliers, commit murder, sing torch songs, deliver long monologues about religion, crack jokes, free-associate waking dreams, stage a coup d’etat and discuss the meaning of the first moon landing, all in the interests of establishing whether God-given ethics exist.”
Often his characters were, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bit players caught up in momentous real or fictitious events. He once told Life magazine that he wrote “about human beings under stress — whether it is about losing one’s trousers or being nailed to the cross.”
Some critics found the commingling of slapstick and tragedy jarring. But Mike Nichols, who directed “The Real Thing” on Broadway in 1984, was more admiring of Mr. Stoppard’s humor, telling the Times, “He has no apparent animus toward anyone or anything. He’s very funny at no one’s expense. That’s supposed not to be possible.”
Tomáš Straussler was born in Zlín, a factory town in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia, on July 3, 1937. His father, a doctor, worked for the Bata shoe company. On March 15, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Strausslers fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory.
In early 1942, with the Japanese preparing to occupy Singapore, Tomáš, his brother and their mother left on a boat for Australia. The elder Straussler remained in Singapore to serve as a doctor in the British army; later that year, he died on a British ship bombed by the Japanese.
The ship carrying the boys and their mother was diverted to India. They ended up in Darjeeling, where “Tommy” attended an American-run school. In 1945, his mother married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and, in 1946, moved the family to England. They eventually settled in Bristol.
Mr. Stoppard attended boarding school, where he was an average student and was subjected to bullying. Eager to leave, he began working as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, where he became a drama critic.
He decided to try his hand at dramatic writing and completed his first full-length play, “A Walk on the Water,” in 1960. Four years later, he drafted “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” A much-revised version opened in 1967 at London’s Old Vic. Later that year, the play transferred to Broadway, where it won the Tony for best play.
Mr. Stoppard was stung by criticism that his plays were more cerebral than emotional, and he worked to reset the balance. “The Real Thing,” written in 1982, explored the pain adultery inflicts on two theatrical couples whose lives intersect on and off stage. In “The Invention of Love” (1997), the late Victorian-era poet A.E. Housman looks back on his life, particularly his unreciprocated feelings for an Oxford classmate. The play was filled with so many allusions to history and literature that New York audiences received a 30-page briefing book.
Several of his later plays were cornucopias of ideas. “Arcadia” (1993) takes place in an English country house in the early 19th and late 20th centuries, with implements like quill pens and laptop computers appearing side by side. The characters include Thomasina Coverly, a fictional precocious teenager who may have discovered chaos theory during the Regency era and, almost 200 years later, academics who converge on the house with questions about a host of topics.
“The Coast of Utopia” (2002) — took on Russian history and intellectual thought from 1833 to 1868. It was presented as a trilogy of plays (“Voyage,” “Shipwreck” and “Salvage”) that together lasted nine hours and was just one of many Stoppard works to delve into themes of censorship and state repression.
He explored the subject of Communist oppression in the plays “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth” (1979) and “Rock ‘n’ Roll” (2006). For reasons literary and political, he translated a number of Czech authors — including Vaclav Havel — into English.
For the movies, he adapted Graham Greene’s espionage novel “The Human Factor” (1979), co-scripted Terry Gilliam’s dystopian comedy “Brazil” (1985) and wrote Steven Spielberg’s 1987 epic “Empire of the Sun,” based on J.G. Ballard’s novel about a boy trapped during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.
Though he got no billing on Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), the director told Empire magazine that Mr. Stoppard was “pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.” He performed similar script-doctor duties on George Lucas’s “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” (2005).
Tall, long-haired and craggily handsome, Mr. Stoppard was sometimes described as looking like Mick Jagger’s older brother. His marriage to Josie Ingle, a nurse, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Miriam Stern, a physician and author, whom he left for Felicity Kendal, an actress who had appeared in several of his plays.
In 2014 he married Guinness. In addition to his wife, survivors include two sons from each of his first two marriages.
Late in life, Mr. Stoppard learned that all four of his grandparents were Jewish and had died in Nazi concentration camps. That discovery led him to write “Leopoldstadt,” a play about a Jewish family in Vienna before and after World War II.
In the play, a character based on the young Mr. Stoppard speaks of his good fortune in becoming a Brit, with his early life in a large Jewish family only a vague memory. A relative who wasn’t as lucky tells the young man, “No one is born eight years old.”
When “Leopoldstadt” opened in London in 2020, Mr. Stoppard told reporters that it was likely to be his last play. (After a pandemic delay, it opened on Broadway in 2022.)
It was an elegiac note on which to take his leave. “ ‘Leopoldstadt’ feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator . . . one man’s passionate declaration of identity as a Jew,” Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in his review of the London production.
Mr. Stoppard told the Guardian, “It stole up on me. I didn’t think, ‘I must finish this off and have people sobbing,’ but in the end I was sobbing myself. . . . Honestly, nothing I have written has had that effect on me.”
The post Tom Stoppard, playwright of electric verve, dies at 88 appeared first on Washington Post.
