Tom Stoppard, whose beloved plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'n' Roll, and Leopoldstadt, has died at the age of 88.
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| Tom Stoppard in 2022 (photo: Philip Romano) |
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The New York Times called Stoppard "the Czech-born 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 the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw....[He] 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."
The Guardian wrote that Stoppard's "playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades."
The Wall Street Journal said Stoppard "spun wordplay, philosophical debates and scientific principles into popular theatrical entertainment, landing a string of West End and Broadway hits [and] was known for elevating intellectual theater in the public consciousness and marrying intellectual depth and dramatic entertainment."
Besides more than 30 plays, Stoppard also wrote screenplays for TV, radio, and the movies. The best-known of them was Shakespeare in Love, for which he and Marc Norman won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His other screenplays included Brazil, Empire of the Sun, The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, Enigma, Anna Karenina, and Parade's End. He adapted his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for film and directed the movie.
And, as the Guardian noted, "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."
Among his many honors, he was knighted in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000. In 2013, he won the PEN Pinter Prize for his "determination to tell things as they are." Another honor was having an adjective based on his name included in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Stoppardian."
Tomorrow London's West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes in honor of Stoppard. The Society of London Theatre's president, Kash Bennett, said Stoppard's "extraordinary voice reshaped modern theatre, combining intellectual daring, emotional depth and razor-sharp wit in work that challenged, moved and delighted audiences across generations."
Among his best-known plays:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) features two minor characters from Hamlet and much of it takes place in the wings of the original play. It's an absurdist, existential work that launched Stoppard's career.
Jumpers (1972) is set in an alternative reality, where British astronauts have landed on the Moon and "radical liberals" run the British government. It's in part a sendup of academia, featuring a professor who can't quite connect to the real world.
Travesties (1974) is set in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1917, and from the point of view of British diplomat Henry Carr, who interacts with Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Dada artist and poet Tristan Tzara, all of whom were in the city that year.
The Real Thing (1982), which includes a play within the play, explores reality versus appearance, and involves a cast of theater folk, especially an actress seeking to free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. "A meditation on the pain of infidelity and the unstable relationship between art and life," per the Guardian.
Arcadia (1993) is set on an English estate in 1809 and then almost 200 years later, and "concerns the human desire to acquire knowledge and the ways in which the most well-educated people misuse, misinterpret or misunderstand it," the Times wrote.
The Invention of Love (1997) focuses on the poet A.E. Housman and interactions with Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater.
The Coast of Utopia (2002) is a trilogy set in Tsarist Russia, that "delved into the private and public passions of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the socialist philosopher Alexander Herzen," the Times noted.
Rock 'n' Roll (2006) is set in Cambridge, England, and Prague and "monitored the politics of oppression and liberalization in late 20th-century Czechoslovakia [and] was a forceful statement on behalf of freedom of expression," according to the Times. The play features music by the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Beach Boys and focuses on the repression following the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968.
Leopoldstadt (2020) is a work in which Stoppard explores his own family history: only in the 1990s did he learn his family, originally from Czechoslovakia, was Jewish and that relatives who hadn't escaped the Nazis as he and his immediate family did had perished in the Holocaust.