Tom Stoppard’s popular and commercial success is a puzzle, as he was so cerebral in his plays, which often come across as lightly disguised lectures. Jumpers, for example, from 1972, was a discussion given by an Oxford professor (who may or may not have been based on the womanizer A. J. Ayer) about moral philosophy, logical positivism, and the search for objective values. For some reason having to do with the professor’s wife being a musical comedy actress, the stage was also filled with trampolinists and circus tumblers.
Then there’s Arcadia, considered by critics to be Stoppard’s masterpiece, which won awards in 1993 and explores, within the format of a murder mystery in a country house, the nineteenth-century Romantic movement (“the decline from thinking to feeling, you see”) and developments in modern physics, with quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes. Audiences came away knowing about chaos theory, thermodynamics, and landscape gardening. The Broadway run starred Billy Crudup, Victor Garber, Robert Sean Leonard, and Paul Giamatti.
If Stoppard had a recurrent theme, it was how absolutes, whether metaphysical or scientific, are constantly undercut by human irregularity, human nonsensicality: “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” Desire, for example, or love and its permutations, bring about not transcendence but, as we learn in The Real Thing, produced in 1982, “mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect.” Stoppard’s characters’ lives—and our lives—are spent navigating a wretched and comical course between rectitude and confusion; how we’d wish to appear and be are at odds with what we actually are and seem. This is a Shakespearean dichotomy, and it’s fitting that Stoppard won an Oscar in 1998 for Shakespeare in Love, where the Bard finds his discombobulating muse in the shape of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Stoppard handled language and linguistic concepts—Do we mean what we say? How do we say what we mean?—with humorous detachment. Was this because he was genuinely an outsider figure, for whom English was a second language, as it was for Nabokov or Joseph Conrad? He was born in 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, as Tomášs Sträussler. (Zlín is also the birthplace of Ivana Trump.) His father was a doctor in an orthopedic shoe factory. By 1939, the family was in Singapore, fleeing the Nazis, only to be met, in 1942, by the Japanese. Stoppard’s mother, Martha Beckova, hastened with Tom to India. Dr. Sträussler volunteered to stay behind to assist casualties and was killed in an air raid.
Four years later, Martha married Major Kenneth Stoppard, and young Tom Stoppard, as he now was named, after a stint at the Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling, was sent to board in England, where he learned English and ceased being a Czech speaking Czech. He remained at Pocklington School, Yorkshire, until he was seventeen.
It’s always a surprise to be reminded that Stoppard never attended university. This may account for the autodidact’s showing off: all the clever-clever references to Lord Byron, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and the lists of books he acknowledged in program notes to demonstrate background research and diligent homework. Instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, Stoppard in 1954 became a reporter for the Western Daily Press and then Bristol’s Evening World. During his interview with the editor, he claimed an interest in politics. Asked to identify the current home secretary, Stoppard replied, “I said I was interested, not obsessed.” He was made motoring correspondent, even though he couldn’t drive. (“I used to review the upholstery,” he later joked.) Years ago, when I was looking through scrapbooks with the veteran actress Constance Cummings, we came across a cutting by Stoppard of a profile he had written of her when she was appearing at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1957: Someone ought to compile an edition of Stoppard’s newspaper articles.
As a regional journalist, Stoppard learned how to be collusive, accessible, how never to come across as an author as condescending or uppish, the pitfalls of university wits. And he was good at jokes: “The days of the digital watch are numbered”; “If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”
In circular fashion, he said the reason he first started writing plays was “because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright,” an unarguable state of affairs. In 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was mounted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and immediately acquired by Kenneth Tynan for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, where it remained in the repertoire for four years. It soon transferred to Broadway, starred Brian Murray and John Wood, won four Tony Awards, and lasted for four hundred twenty performances. “What is it about?” Stoppard was asked. “It’s about to make me very rich,” he replied with truth. About three hundred thousand pounds came his way, millions in today’s currency.
How impressed would today’s general public be, I wonder, when fewer and fewer are well read? You need an above-average working knowledge of Hamlet to follow Stoppard’s ingenious re-configuration of Shakespeare’s original drama, as seen through the eyes of the minor characters, the jostle of ambassadors and diplomats at Elsinore. The original play, as it were, and the famous speeches are glimpsed and overheard backstage or from the wings, with Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia coming and going. “Every exit,” we are told, “is an entrance somewhere else.”
Stoppard deployed the structure again, even more dizzyingly, in Travesties, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974. James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are in Zurich during World War I, putting on an amateur version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It was all enough to confirm that Stoppard had become a dependable razzle-dazzler, with his abundant literary and cultural references—everything playful and entertaining, and profoundly unlike any kitchen-sink murk generated by John Osborne and Harold Pinter, his bleak contemporaries.
Stoppard quickly became a celebrity figure, raffish, flamboyant, tall, with a thick mop of curly hair and a pout. (His idol was Mick Jagger.) He was always smoking, which didn’t seem to affect his health adversely (he was eighty-eight when he died), and when on television, giving interviews, or pontificating, it was noticeable how he’d retained—or fostered—something of a Central European accent. Stoppard reminded me, in fact, of one of those exotic exiles who’d ended up in Hollywood—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz—and he was to be in demand as an uncredited script doctor, titivating dialogue for Spielberg and devising lines for Indiana Jones, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jason Bourne, and Ichabod Crane. J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Graham Greene’s Human Factor, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the last of which starred Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, all benefited from Stoppard screenplays.
These highly paid assignments allowed Stoppard the leisure to spend time “looking for inspiration” for his stage work, as he told Andrew Billen. Potential subjects included machines learning how to think and imagine, electronic surveillance, climate change, and the erosion of free speech, the last an especial terror to anyone who’d experienced totalitarianism, as Stoppard had. “The only thing that would make me leave England would be control over free speech,” he said in 1977. (Nearly fifty years on he might well have been looking for his passport.) Yet he remained a commendably positive person, never morose, at least publicly, if liable to irony—as when he vouchsafed, or had a character in Arcadia vouchsafe, “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you know is wrong.”
Is that a challenging or actually an unsettling notion? Stoppard, it is fair to say, tended to avoid the present day, the contemporary scene. The best possible time to be alive in his universe was in the past, when things were more fixed and taken on trust. We are safely back in the past in The Invention of Love, for example, an esoteric study of A. E. Housman’s Latin translations and another costume drama, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1997. The play included appearances by Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and other historical luminaries. Audiences were given a useful thirty-page booklet explaining who was who and describing the mores of the late Victorian period.
Stoppard himself translated and freely adapted for London’s National Theatre plays by Schnitzler, Nestroy, and Molnár—as if returning to his Central European origins—and he was always alert to human rights abuses in communist countries, where the sort of individuality and intellectual gaiety he represented aroused suspicion and was suppressed. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, for example, a collaboration with André Previn, was about political prisoners locked up by the regime in mental hospitals, the paradox (out of Kafka or Lewis Carroll) of sane men put in an asylum for saying sane men are put in asylums. In many Stoppard works, the villains are the doctrinaire, those who impose their ideologies on others. He was a devotee of flights of fancy: “I wrote plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.” One of his favorite quotations (from Christopher Hampton) was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least I think I am.” Another line he surely appreciated was Buñuel’s “I am an atheist, thank God.”
This all adds up to a quicksilver personality, slightly slippery, perhaps—a psychological escapologist. There’s none of the spleen and invective of Osborne or the dour, grim bovinity of Pinter. Stoppard’s first marriage, in 1965, was to Josie Ingle, a nurse. His second, in 1972, and remaining within the medical profession, was to Miriam Stern, who as Miriam Stoppard became a television presenter, advising viewers on healthy nutrition and birth control. After nineteen years of that, Stoppard moved in with Felicity Kendal, best known for the B.B.C. sitcom The Good Life, who appeared on stage in many of his plays.
From 2014, Stoppard was to be found in Blandford Forum, Dorset, which is where he was to die in November 2025. He had married Sabrina Guinness, a member of the brewing dynasty and a former girlfriend of Prince Charles. Thoroughly conservative and patriotic in his outlook, Stoppard enjoyed lunching with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace: “Everything you touch is beautiful, and the food is superb.” He also dined with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street; she approved of his stance on the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc.
The refugee from Zlín turned himself into a dandified English gentleman, with a knighthood and the Order of Merit, the latter an honor handed out by the monarch to only twenty-four living individuals in the fields of science, art, and literature. Stoppard’s fellow recipients included the naturalist David Attenborough; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet; and David Hockney, the colorful dauber. He was a keen cricketer. He lived in mansions and manor houses, surrounded by parkland. As he put it, “I’m the person who is overgrateful to this country because I was embraced by it.”
Tom Stoppard’s popular and commercial success is a puzzle, as he was so cerebral in his plays, which often come across as lightly disguised lectures. Jumpers, for example, from 1972, was a discussion given by an Oxford professor (who may or may not have been based on the womanizer A. J. Ayer) about moral philosophy, logical positivism, and the search for objective values. For some reason having to do with the professor’s wife being a musical comedy actress, the stage was also filled with trampolinists and circus tumblers.
Then there’s Arcadia, considered by critics to be Stoppard’s masterpiece, which won awards in 1993 and explores, within the format of a murder mystery in a country house, the nineteenth-century Romantic movement (“the decline from thinking to feeling, you see”) and developments in modern physics, with quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes. Audiences came away knowing about chaos theory, thermodynamics, and landscape gardening. The Broadway run starred Billy Crudup, Victor Garber, Robert Sean Leonard, and Paul Giamatti.
If Stoppard had a recurrent theme, it was how absolutes, whether metaphysical or scientific, are constantly undercut by human irregularity, human nonsensicality: “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” Desire, for example, or love and its permutations, bring about not transcendence but, as we learn in The Real Thing, produced in 1982, “mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect.” Stoppard’s characters’ lives—and our lives—are spent navigating a wretched and comical course between rectitude and confusion; how we’d wish to appear and be are at odds with what we actually are and seem. This is a Shakespearean dichotomy, and it’s fitting that Stoppard won an Oscar in 1998 for Shakespeare in Love, where the Bard finds his discombobulating muse in the shape of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Stoppard handled language and linguistic concepts—Do we mean what we say? How do we say what we mean?—with humorous detachment. Was this because he was genuinely an outsider figure, for whom English was a second language, as it was for Nabokov or Joseph Conrad? He was born in 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, as Tomášs Sträussler. (Zlín is also the birthplace of Ivana Trump.) His father was a doctor in an orthopedic shoe factory. By 1939, the family was in Singapore, fleeing the Nazis, only to be met, in 1942, by the Japanese. Stoppard’s mother, Martha Beckova, hastened with Tom to India. Dr. Sträussler volunteered to stay behind to assist casualties and was killed in an air raid.
Four years later, Martha married Major Kenneth Stoppard, and young Tom Stoppard, as he now was named, after a stint at the Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling, was sent to board in England, where he learned English and ceased being a Czech speaking Czech. He remained at Pocklington School, Yorkshire, until he was seventeen.
It’s always a surprise to be reminded that Stoppard never attended university. This may account for the autodidact’s showing off: all the clever-clever references to Lord Byron, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and the lists of books he acknowledged in program notes to demonstrate background research and diligent homework. Instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge, Stoppard in 1954 became a reporter for the Western Daily Press and then Bristol’s Evening World. During his interview with the editor, he claimed an interest in politics. Asked to identify the current home secretary, Stoppard replied, “I said I was interested, not obsessed.” He was made motoring correspondent, even though he couldn’t drive. (“I used to review the upholstery,” he later joked.) Years ago, when I was looking through scrapbooks with the veteran actress Constance Cummings, we came across a cutting by Stoppard of a profile he had written of her when she was appearing at the Bristol Hippodrome in 1957: Someone ought to compile an edition of Stoppard’s newspaper articles.
As a regional journalist, Stoppard learned how to be collusive, accessible, how never to come across as an author as condescending or uppish, the pitfalls of university wits. And he was good at jokes: “The days of the digital watch are numbered”; “If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”
In circular fashion, he said the reason he first started writing plays was “because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright,” an unarguable state of affairs. In 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was mounted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and immediately acquired by Kenneth Tynan for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, where it remained in the repertoire for four years. It soon transferred to Broadway, starred Brian Murray and John Wood, won four Tony Awards, and lasted for four hundred twenty performances. “What is it about?” Stoppard was asked. “It’s about to make me very rich,” he replied with truth. About three hundred thousand pounds came his way, millions in today’s currency.
How impressed would today’s general public be, I wonder, when fewer and fewer are well read? You need an above-average working knowledge of Hamlet to follow Stoppard’s ingenious re-configuration of Shakespeare’s original drama, as seen through the eyes of the minor characters, the jostle of ambassadors and diplomats at Elsinore. The original play, as it were, and the famous speeches are glimpsed and overheard backstage or from the wings, with Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia coming and going. “Every exit,” we are told, “is an entrance somewhere else.”
Stoppard deployed the structure again, even more dizzyingly, in Travesties, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974. James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara are in Zurich during World War I, putting on an amateur version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It was all enough to confirm that Stoppard had become a dependable razzle-dazzler, with his abundant literary and cultural references—everything playful and entertaining, and profoundly unlike any kitchen-sink murk generated by John Osborne and Harold Pinter, his bleak contemporaries.
Stoppard quickly became a celebrity figure, raffish, flamboyant, tall, with a thick mop of curly hair and a pout. (His idol was Mick Jagger.) He was always smoking, which didn’t seem to affect his health adversely (he was eighty-eight when he died), and when on television, giving interviews, or pontificating, it was noticeable how he’d retained—or fostered—something of a Central European accent. Stoppard reminded me, in fact, of one of those exotic exiles who’d ended up in Hollywood—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz—and he was to be in demand as an uncredited script doctor, titivating dialogue for Spielberg and devising lines for Indiana Jones, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jason Bourne, and Ichabod Crane. J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Graham Greene’s Human Factor, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the last of which starred Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, all benefited from Stoppard screenplays.
These highly paid assignments allowed Stoppard the leisure to spend time “looking for inspiration” for his stage work, as he told Andrew Billen. Potential subjects included machines learning how to think and imagine, electronic surveillance, climate change, and the erosion of free speech, the last an especial terror to anyone who’d experienced totalitarianism, as Stoppard had. “The only thing that would make me leave England would be control over free speech,” he said in 1977. (Nearly fifty years on he might well have been looking for his passport.) Yet he remained a commendably positive person, never morose, at least publicly, if liable to irony—as when he vouchsafed, or had a character in Arcadia vouchsafe, “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you know is wrong.”
Is that a challenging or actually an unsettling notion? Stoppard, it is fair to say, tended to avoid the present day, the contemporary scene. The best possible time to be alive in his universe was in the past, when things were more fixed and taken on trust. We are safely back in the past in The Invention of Love, for example, an esoteric study of A. E. Housman’s Latin translations and another costume drama, which won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1997. The play included appearances by Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and other historical luminaries. Audiences were given a useful thirty-page booklet explaining who was who and describing the mores of the late Victorian period.
Stoppard himself translated and freely adapted for London’s National Theatre plays by Schnitzler, Nestroy, and Molnár—as if returning to his Central European origins—and he was always alert to human rights abuses in communist countries, where the sort of individuality and intellectual gaiety he represented aroused suspicion and was suppressed. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, for example, a collaboration with André Previn, was about political prisoners locked up by the regime in mental hospitals, the paradox (out of Kafka or Lewis Carroll) of sane men put in an asylum for saying sane men are put in asylums. In many Stoppard works, the villains are the doctrinaire, those who impose their ideologies on others. He was a devotee of flights of fancy: “I wrote plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.” One of his favorite quotations (from Christopher Hampton) was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least I think I am.” Another line he surely appreciated was Buñuel’s “I am an atheist, thank God.”
This all adds up to a quicksilver personality, slightly slippery, perhaps—a psychological escapologist. There’s none of the spleen and invective of Osborne or the dour, grim bovinity of Pinter. Stoppard’s first marriage, in 1965, was to Josie Ingle, a nurse. His second, in 1972, and remaining within the medical profession, was to Miriam Stern, who as Miriam Stoppard became a television presenter, advising viewers on healthy nutrition and birth control. After nineteen years of that, Stoppard moved in with Felicity Kendal, best known for the B.B.C. sitcom The Good Life, who appeared on stage in many of his plays.
From 2014, Stoppard was to be found in Blandford Forum, Dorset, which is where he was to die in November 2025. He had married Sabrina Guinness, a member of the brewing dynasty and a former girlfriend of Prince Charles. Thoroughly conservative and patriotic in his outlook, Stoppard enjoyed lunching with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace: “Everything you touch is beautiful, and the food is superb.” He also dined with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street; she approved of his stance on the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc.
The refugee from Zlín turned himself into a dandified English gentleman, with a knighthood and the Order of Merit, the latter an honor handed out by the monarch to only twenty-four living individuals in the fields of science, art, and literature. Stoppard’s fellow recipients included the naturalist David Attenborough; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet; and David Hockney, the colorful dauber. He was a keen cricketer. He lived in mansions and manor houses, surrounded by parkland. As he put it, “I’m the person who is overgrateful to this country because I was embraced by it.”
