Sir Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was a playwright whose works combine dazzling verbal and theatrical flair with intellectual inquiry, and won him three Oliviers, five Tonies and an astonishing ten Evening Standard Theatre Awards. These recognized plays as diverse as his 1966 breakthrough hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1982’s The Real Thing and the instant modern classic Arcadia in 1993. They also included special awards in 2011 saluting his work translating Russian drama, particularly Chekhov, and in 2014 proclaiming him Britain’s greatest living playwright.
“I feel a bit guilty, because I haven’t done anything [i.e. written a play] this year,” he said at the ceremony in 2014. “But then I remembered I got married.” Debunking his professional status with a joke about his recent third marriage - to Sabrina Guinness, part of the “banking line” of the eminent Guinness family - was typical of Stoppard, who retained an observer’s ironic distance despite having become very much part of the Establishment.
He had a lucrative second career as a writer or co-writer of original screenplays – Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, an Indiana Jones and a Star Wars installment, Parade’s End on TV and most famously Shakespeare in Love, for which he won an Oscar in 1998 - and as an anonymous polisher of others’ dialogue.
But he was essentially a creature of the stage and a highly visible part of the London social whirl: tall and dandyish with a cockade of dark hair and what one critic called a “huge moose jaw”, always good for an apercu or an opinion. Stoppard once opined that if Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing soap operas. Then he corrected himself: he’d be “rewriting” them.
Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard was subject to multiple displacements by the Second World War, and for decades afterwards remained heedless of his Jewish heritage, which he eventually explored in his late masterpiece Leopoldstadt in 2020.
In 2015 he told me he regarded theatre as essentially a “recreation”, albeit one that can expand the mind as it entertains. But the cerebral showmanship of his early plays gave way to explorations of lives lived under the kind of regimes he had escaped. Similarly his early enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher changed to a suspicion of all forms of authoritarianism and censorship. His plays are never simply entertaining or simply political, covering concepts as diverse as quantum theory, thermodynamics and the nature of love.
When his mother married army major Kenneth Stoppard, eight-year-old Tomáš Sträussler received a new surname and an English identity which he embraced with romantic gusto. An autodidact who left school at 17, he had an omnivorous hunger for knowledge, a passion for cricket and an enormous appetite for cigarettes.
Success brought him all the trappings of an English gent – a country house, first editions of Dickens – and he was knighted in 1997. But in that 2015 interview he told me he still felt like an outsider, even in London: for years he kept a flat in Chelsea Harbour and complained that after the erection of certain riverside towers he could no longer set his watch by Big Ben.
Though gregarious, charming and even courtly in his manners he was a private man who regretted the gossipy attention that attended his second marriage to the writer and TV presenter Dr Miriam Stoppard and his relationship with actress Felicity Kendal, his muse for a decade or so. A later affair with actress Sinead Cusack, preceding his marriage to Guiness, was revealed in Hermione Lee’s definitive 2020 biography of him. Guinness survives him, as do his sons Oliver and Barney from his first marriage to Josie Ingle and William and Ed – an actor - with Miriam.
Stoppard’s doctor father Eugen worked for the shoe company Bata. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia the family – including Stoppard’s older brother Petr – fled to Singapore, where the company had a factory. In 1942, his mother Martha took her sons to India as Japan threatened Singapore; Eugen was due to join them later but the ship he sailed on was torpedoed and sunk.
In 1945 Martha married Kenneth Stoppard and the following year they moved to the UK. Tom, as he now became, only learned in 1993 from a cousin that his heritage was entirely Jewish, and that all four grandparents and many other relatives had been murdered in the Nazi death camps. He first wrote directly about this in a 1993 article, On Being Jewish, in Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, but noted that many of the characters he’d created over the preceding three decades did not fit entirely into the milieu in which they found themselves.
After school in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire he joined the Western Daily Press in 1954, and later the Bristol Evening Post, and from 1962-3 was theatre critic of Scene magazine in London. His early years in journalism gave rise to several possibly apocryphal stories that nonetheless fed the Stoppard myth. Having claimed an interest in politics he was asked by an editor to name the Home Secretary and replied: “I said I was interested, not obsessed.”
Finding himself sat behind his hero Harold Pinter at a production of the latter’s play The Birthday Party he blurted “are you Harold Pinter or do you only look like him?” and was met by a baleful, silencing stare. (Decades later, Stoppard supposedly said that rather than rename London’s Comedy Theatre in Pinter’s honour it would be simpler for the famously irascible Pinter to change his name to “Harold Comedy”.)
From 1953 he wrote radio plays and his 1960 stage drama, A Walk on Water, was mounted in Hamburg then broadcast on commercial television. A grant in 1964 enabled him to produce the script that would eventually become the metatheatrical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, featuring the existential musings of the two peripheral (and interchangeable) characters from Hamlet.
It was staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 and the following year at the National Theatre at the Old Vic. “What’s it about?” an audience member is supposed to have asked him, eliciting the reply: “It’s about to make me very rich.” The play became a sensation, and Stoppard was named Most Promising Playwright in the 1967 Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
More hits followed: the larky Jumpers (1972) which mixed philosophy and gymnastics; the erudite Travesties (1974) which imagines a meeting between Lenin, James Joyce and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara in 1917; the jokey media satire Night and Day (1978) and The Real Thing (1982) about love and fidelity. All won Standard awards, and they represent a smidgen of his prolific early output on stage, TV and radio.
The Real Thing featured a Stoppard-esque writer in a relationship with an actress, played in the original production by Felicity Kendal, and is often cited incorrectly as a portrait of Stoppard’s affair with her (which in fact began later). Having repeated this error in an article about a 2010 revival I sent a note of apology to Stoppard. He replied with a charming card telling me not to worry, because “the actress in the revival looks rather like Fliss, so I’m on a sticky wicket”.
His correspondence skills were legendary, he was (according to his son Barnaby) a hands-on and affectionate father even while writing and smoking furiously; and he read prodigious amounts. After co-writing Brazil with Gilliam in 1985 film took up increasing amounts of his time: he adapted Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Enigma, among other full or partial writing credits.
But still the plays came: Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love and in 2002 the magnificent National Theatre trilogy The Coast of Utopia, about pre-revolutionary Russia. In 2006, he addressed his Czech heritage, his attitude to Englishness, communism and counterculture music in Rock ‘n’ Roll, which opened at the Royal Court and starred Sinead Cusack.
A surprise came in 2012, when Stoppard, at the age of 75, delivered a sumptuous five-part BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy of novels Parade’s End, about families in the run up to and throughout World War One, as well as the script for Joe Wright’s adaptation of Anna Karenina.
His 2015 stage play The Hard Problem lived up to its name, but the sprawling Leopoldstadt, about a Viennese Jewish family, was regarded by many as a semi-autobiographical magnum opus that set a capstone on his career. The original sold-out West End run in 2020 was interrupted by the Covid pandemic, but it returned in 2021 and won the Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway in 2022.
Before his death he witnessed stunning revivals of The Real Thing at the Old Vic and of Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre. A revival of Indian Ink, once again starring Felicity Kendal - albeit in a different role - opens at Hampstead on Dec 15.
West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday 2 December in remembrance of Stoppard, with Kash Bennett, President of the Society of London Theatre, saying, “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Sir Tom Stoppard... His loss creates a vast void in our cultural world, and his legacy will continue to inspire.”
Stoppard leaves a peerless body of work and can claim to have both entertained us and fought the forces of oppression with his pen. And like his fellow revolutionary writers and ardent cricketers, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, his name became a byword for a recognisable seam of drama. Tom Stoppard may be gone, but a play that is witty, clever, showmanlike and provoking will always be “Stoppardian”.
