The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled British theatregoing audiences for decades, has died aged 88.
One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006).
A new Stoppard play has been an international event ever since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, featuring two obscure Shakespearean courtiers, was spotted on the Edinburgh fringe in 1966 and developed by the London-based National Theatre.
He combined more than 30 plays for the theatre with a steady stream of works for television and radio, and with screenplays including an adaptation of John le Carré’s The Russia House, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and a joint credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.
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But his influence went far further than his on-screen credits would suggest: he was the go-to writer for blockbusters in need of a bit of spit and polish (including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the Star Wars adventure Revenge of the Sith). Steven Spielberg once dragged him out of the shower with an urgent phone call to discuss a problem with Schindler’s List.
Stoppard was married three times and famously sociable. The playwright Simon Gray captured something of his charmed life when he quipped: “It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except possibly his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”
His early childhood was not auspicious. Born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia, he was not yet two years old when his Jewish parents fled the Nazi invasion of 1939 for Singapore. Three years later, he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother, leaving his father behind to a fatal confrontation with the Japanese occupation as an army medical officer. After his father’s death, his mother married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, who adopted the boys and moved the family back to England after the war.
Stoppard left school at 17, initially to become a journalist on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. After a couple of years of playing around with short radio plays, his first stage play was picked up for the theatre in Hamburg and television in the UK. Moving to London, he wrote theatre reviews under the Evelyn Waugh-inspired pseudonym William Boot, before a Ford Foundation grant enabled him to escape to Berlin to devote himself to the idea that would become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Though the intellectual pyrotechnics and bravura theatricality of his early work led some to dismiss him as more head than heart, that began to change with The Real Thing, a meditation on the pain of infidelity and the unstable relationship between art and life, which Michael Billington ranked among the 101 greatest plays ever written. Premiered in the West End in 1982, it starred Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees in roles that were reprised on Broadway by Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.
During the 15 years after The Real Thing, he hit the top of his game. According to his biographer Hermione Lee, Stoppard himself felt that Arcadia (1993) was probably his best play, while The Invention of Love (1997) – about the poet AE Housman – was his favourite. Only Hapgood (1988) fell foul of the old charge that it was too clever by half, with its combination of spy story and particle theory, though it was widely felt to be vindicated by a 2015 revival at Hampstead theatre.
For all his personal sociability, as a writer Stoppard was a loner who did not share the left-leaning political sympathies of his playwriting contemporaries. Describing himself as a “timid libertarian” and “an honorary Englishman”, he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and, in 1984, signed a letter of support for the US invasion of Grenada. He was awarded a CBE in 1978 and was knighted in 1997. In 2013, he was awarded the PEN Pinter prize for his “determination to tell things as they are”.
He returned often to his central European origins, with works anatomising the cold war, including Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), commissioned by André Previn for performance with a full onstage orchestra, and his great television play Professional Foul, which was screened in the same year. The latter was dedicated to his friend Václav Havel, who at the time was in and out of jail.
He was in his 50s before he discovered the truth about his Jewish origins, and into his 80s by the time the knowledge metabolised into his late-period masterpiece Leopoldstadt, which followed a once prosperous Viennese family from 1899 to 1955. – Guardian
