Tom Stoppard didn’t wait for you to catch up. He trusted that you would, but he was a brilliant writer who crafted narratives in such a way that you had to pay close attention to decipher their meaning. Mark Harris, a brilliant writer in his own field, said on Bluesky that, “I’m sure there are people who saw Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, The Invention of Love, and Travesties and never once thought, uh-oh, I should’ve read up beforehand. I am not one of them. Sometimes, what I didn’t know frustrated me. But there is joy in racing to keep up.”
That was the charm of Stoppard, whether it was on the stage in masterpieces like Arcadia and The Real Thing or in films like “Brazil” and “Empire of the Sun.” He was one of the best writers of his generation, a playwright and screenwriter who not only never talked down to his audience, he lifted them up to join him.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Sträussler fled his small town with his family in March of 1939, the day that the Nazis invaded the country. Stops in Singapore and India, along with the death of his father when he was only four, shaped the worldview of a multicultural intellect, something enhanced even further when his mother remarried a major in the British Army, a man named Kenneth Stoppard. Now going by Tom, Stoppard grew up in Nottingham, getting a job as a journalist in Bristol when he was only 17. The fact that one of the form’s smartest playwrights never went to university is a wonderful piece of trivia. He learned from the vibrant community around him. In Bristol, while working for the Bristol Evening World, he would hang out at the Old Vic, where he made friends like John Boorman and Peter O’Toole.
Stoppard wrote radio plays in the ‘50s and his first stage play in 1960, but his breakthrough came with a one-act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which would later be retitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which made Stoppard a hit in the West End after it premiered in 1967. A sort of hybrid of Waiting for Godot and Shakespeare, it’s one of the first and best examples of telling a famous story from the perspective of another character. In this case, it’s two friends of Hamlet, but this is no mere fun experiment in POV. Stoppard uses the clever idea to create an existential comedy that questions purpose and meaning. When it reached Broadway in Fall 1967, it became a huge hit, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. Stoppard himself wrote and directed a film version of it, starring Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss, in 1990.
The next major Stoppard work would come in 1972 with the mesmerizing Jumpers. It’s a surreal, deeply philosophical piece of fiction that involves a British moon landing and, again, the very meaning of life. It’s incredibly ambitious, even if U.S. audiences hated it after its Chicago premiere in 1975. Critics would come around to it, understanding that it’s a bit of self-reflection on how it captures the limits of intelligence. While it can seem disjointed, it’s also a great example of Stoppard’s intellect when it comes to dialogue: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”
Stoppard’s next masterpiece came in 1982. After years of working with Polish and Czech absurdists, often translating their plays into English, and with a famous French acting movement known as Outrapo, he wrote The Real Thing. Arguably more accessible than any of Stoppard’s stage works, it’s the story of a playwright named Henry and an actress named Annie, who are attempting to force the release of a soldier who has been arrested for setting fire to a wreath. A play within the play, House of Cards allows Stoppard to interrogate the values and limits of art in a world of more serious issues, like political protest, while also delving deep into his own flaws as a writer and husband in a manner that felt autobiographical. It won the Tony Award for Best Play, a version directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. (All three of them won Tonys, too.)
Film called and Stoppard answered with one of the most daring scripts of the ‘80s for Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” Stoppard would land an Oscar nomination for his work (although he didn’t win) and went on to contribute to both “Empire of the Sun” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Steven Spielberg would claim that Stoppard wrote most of the dialogue in that film, and the New York Times discovered that the entire character of Sean Connery’s memorable father role appears to be a Stoppard creation. The same story reveals that Stoppard sent notes on both “Schindler’s List,” “Hook,” and “Always,” and that he even “interfered with George’s script in a mild way” for “The Revenge of the Sith.”
His biggest film success came in 1998 with his Oscar-winning script for “Shakespeare in Love,” a movie that drew on his immense knowledge of the Bard to create a new comedy. It was a huge hit, going on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Other major screenwriting credits include “The Russia House,” “Enigma,” HBO’s “Parade’s End,” and Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” a truly wonderful adaptation.
Tom Stoppard gave the world another masterpiece, and probably my favorite of his works, in 1993’s Arcadia, a mind-bending piece of storytelling that intertwines stories that take place in the same house in 1809 and the present day. Back then, a girl named Thomasina learns about Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Alexandrian Library, a historical event that bleeds into a story of how knowledge is eternal. A story of the butterfly effect of discovery and how the passage of time can give order to chaos—what Thomasina learns and discovers in her time becomes something new in the present day—it is such an intellectually daring piece of playwriting, a piece of work that left my jaw on the floor when I was lucky enough to see it in 1995 as a young theater major. I still don’t fully comprehend all of the themes of Arcadia. It doesn’t make me love it less. In fact, it just makes me want to reread it. To find the joy in racing to catch up with it.
One last thing that’s almost too good to be true. Arcadia is about the power of knowledge and research. And that power appears to have actually saved lives. In a Letter to the Editor in today’s The Times, a professor emeritus of surgery from University College London writes:
“In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.”