Selections of excellence are traditionally a Top 10. However, given Sir Tom Stoppard’s great love of cricket – which features in one of his most celebrated speeches – it seems fitting to choose a first XI among his works for stage, screen, TV and radio. There is no order of precedence: in cricket, any number on the card can be a gamechanger. (Most scripts are published by Faber; streaming details where available.)
1. Arcadia (1993)
Stoppard’s most complex theatrical timescale cuts between an English country house in the early 19th and late 20th centuries, setting up delicate echoes and contradictions that explore literature, architecture, mathematics, physics and the elusiveness of historical truth. A joke about a hermit with a curiosity about current events is one of the dramatist’s best and this haunting mid-career piece among his most admired and revived plays.
2. Brazil (1985)
Coming to England as a child after a fraught childhood in Czechoslovakia, Singapore and India, Stoppard developed a liking for local humour from the Goons through Morecambe and Wise to Monty Python. The latter’s Terry Gilliam hired Stoppard and Charles McKeown to cowrite this brilliant satirical sci-fi film set in a bureaucratic dystopian society. Shared authorship doesn’t dilute a distinct Stoppardian tone: a sort of Kafkaesque-Pythonesque, uniting his native and adopted cultures. (Disney+ / Apple TV+).
3. The Real Thing (1982)
Stoppard’s sixth major play was the first set in a contemporary England. Dazzlingly self-reflective, it is a West End comedy in which a playwright, Henry, has written a West End comedy starring his first wife, to whom he is soon paying alimony after events that play out within plays. A dropped hankie (Othello) exposes a love affair that is then threatened by the temptation of adultery during a production about incest (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore). Regular revivals – most recently at the Old Vic in autumn 2024 – reveal ever more of an ingenious structure in which lines, scenes and props repeat with different, darker meaning about where the truth lies in love, politics and art, Stoppard’s position revealed through the metaphor of a cricket bat.
4. Professional Foul (1977)
The writer was equivocal about this script, which he wrote in a few weeks after struggling with a BBC TV commission. However – surely calling for a tribute rerun soon on BBC Four – its 85 minutes are one of the writer’s deftest uses of a favourite device – parallel, cross-pollinating worlds. A colloquium of philosophers and linguists takes place at the same hotel in communist Czechoslovakia where the England football team is staying for a vital international. Football fan academic Anderson (Peter Barkworth), who is giving a paper in order to see the fixture, referees complex questions of whistleblowing in the cold war.
5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
Stoppard’s reputation-making play, in common with many that followed, used a classic as a trampoline: two minor attendant lords in Hamlet find themselves in the title and at the centre of a lovely jumbling of Shakespeare and Stoppard lines and scenes. Starting with a time-passing, coin-tossing scene that warps the laws of probability, it foregrounded Stoppard’s comedic skills, leading some to overlook an underlying seriousness: the fifth word of the title is key to this deep reflection on chance and mortality. In cricketing terms, Stoppard’s most prolific all-rounder, it is frequently revived in theatre and is his only play to have become a movie, directed by Stoppard himself, in 1990. (Paramount+, BFI Player).
6. Rock’n’Roll (2006) / Leopoldstadt (2020)
Cricket rules allow a 12th player as an alternate and these two stage plays feel inseparable as alternative biographies of Stoppard. Moving between Cambridge and Prague from 1968-89 (dates of unsuccessful and successful eastern European revolutions), Rock’n’Roll imagines the dramatist’s life if his family had not fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia; would he, under the subsequent communist occupation, have been a dissident or a collaborator? Inspired by the writer’s late-life realisation that his family was fully Jewish, Leopoldstadt, though uprooting the Stoppard family tree to Vienna, grapples with having escaped a Holocaust that claimed all four grandparents. A 1955-set coda featuring Leo, a clear authorial surrogate, is one of Stoppard’s most searing and personal scenes.
7. The Dog It Was That Died (1982)
An anecdote has Stoppard being called by Steven Spielberg with a movie script offer for a zillion dollars. The writer regrets that he is under commission to the BBC, triggering incredulity that he would turn down a movie for TV? The reported reply: “No. Radio.” Of Stoppard’s 10 sound plays from 1964-2013, The Dog It Was That Died – about a secret agent who can’t remember which side he’s on – stands out for its site-specific sound effects (a sick donkey scalded by hot tongs stampedes across a living room setting off multiple antique clocks), manic punning (an “unsavoury business” caused by toasted cheese) and the interest in espionage fiction that led to the Le Carré movie adaptation The Russia House (1990) and Stoppard’s own spy stage drama, Hapgood (1988).
8. Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Stoppard shared credit and Oscar with Marc Norman (who wrote an original version) with this script which extends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’s exuberant Shakespearean scholarship by focusing on the playwright himself. Until the later alternative memoir plays, this was Stoppard’s most autobiographical work, dramatising, at four centuries’ remove, the practicalities of a dramatic career – boorish producers, preening actors, commissions, rewrites, inspiration, falling in love with actors. (Apple TV+, Prime Video, BFI Player)
9. The Coast of Utopia (2002)
This vast trilogy about Russian intellectuals in European exile during the revolutions of the mid-19th century was in places overlong and underwritten when premiered at the National. But a shorter, tauter rewrite for Broadway in 2006 – winning Stoppard one of his five Tony Best Play awards – clarified some of the writer’s biggest thoughts on recurrent themes – dissidence, literature, nationality, parental love and journalism – and these revised texts surely soon deserve their UK premiere.
10. Parade’s End (2012)
Stage and cinema had kept Stoppard from television for three decades when he was persuaded back by material too huge for a movie – Ford Madox Ford’s sequence of novels, Parade’s End, in which a love triangle in London plays out before and during the first world war, giving Stoppard another chance at a favourite theme of lives pressured by history. Written during a nine-year theatrical drought – the longest of his career – it received his fullest attention both at the desk and on set and must feature in the BBC TV tribute. Also notable for Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the physically and emotionally wounded aristocrat, Christopher Tietjens. (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+)
11. The Real Inspector Hound (1968)
Without declaring it a policy, Stoppard borrowed most theatrical forms – Shakespeare (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), sex comedy (Dirty Linen, 1976), romance (The Real Thing), musical (Rough Crossing, 1984), thriller (Hapgood). His parodic mousetrap catches Agatha Christie in The Real Inspector Hound, in which theatre critics (Stoppard’s first profession) reviewing a country house murder mystery become involved in the action amid effervescent playing with words and structure.
