Tom Stoppard, who died on Nov. 29 aged 88, was the greatest living playwright in English. As a linguistic dazzler, onstage and off, Stoppard was a Wildean contriver of brilliant witticisms who also alchemized the heaviest of intellectual metals into the lightest repartee. Though his work indulged this English preference for making a joke out of everything, it also carried a continental charge of intellectual seriousness. A Stoppard play made you laugh, but it was also a history lesson.
Stoppard was born Tomas Strausser in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937. His father, Eugen, was a doctor at the Bata shoe company. When the Nazis invaded in 1943, the family fled for Singapore. When the Japanese invaded in 1942, Eugen stayed behind while Tom, his mother, Martha, and his brother, Petr, fled to India. There, Martha married Major Kenneth Stoppard, an English officer who, when India became independent in 1947, took his family to England and educated his adopted sons as Englishmen.
Tom Stoppard was good at cricket but left school at 17 for local journalism. In 1966, he had his first theatrical hit with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist riff on two extras from Hamlet. The serious fun continued with Jumpers (1972), a spoof of academic philosophy, and Travesties (1974), which imagined the meeting of Lenin, James Joyce, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who all lived in Zurich on the eve of World War I.
Stoppard was a small-c conservative in a liberal business. When the pompous leftie Harold Pinter wrote, seeking Stoppard’s endorsement for a proposal to rename London’s Comedy Theatre in his honor, Stoppard replied, “Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?” The flash of mockery sparked from deep political integrity. Stoppard’s long excavation of his origins began in 1977 with Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, a collaboration with Andre Previn on Soviet dissidents, and his visits to the dissidents Andre Sakharov in Moscow and Vaclav Havel in Prague.
I first encountered Stoppard on a rugby pitch in 1983. I was on it, face down in the mud. He was on the touchline, sporting a fedora, college scarf, and greatcoat; in character, perhaps a little too much. It turned out that one of the gentleman hooligans on our team was his son. Stoppard père had lately got together with the actress Felicity Kendall, who had originated, as Stoppard would never have said, the role of Annie in The Real Thing, Stoppard’s 1982 comedy of leftie hypocrisy in both its marital and limousine liberal varieties. Again, a little too much in character. My parents were in “The Profession,” and Stoppard visited regularly. He was witty, friendly, and as unknowable as his anonymous script-doctoring on Star Wars: Episode III.
By the 1990s, Stoppard was in a class of his own. The balance between character and intellect, wit and debate in Arcadia, his 1993 treatment of English Romanticism, and The Coast of Utopia, his 2002 dramatization of pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual life, is stunning in its depth and grace. The Invention of Love (1997), on the gay life of Victorian Oxford and English aestheticism, is the smartest play in modern English. His script for Shakespeare in Love (1998) is pitch-perfect, at once reflexive and sincere.
Stoppard, the “bounced Czech,” claimed that he had not known that he was Jewish until a relative confirmed it in 1994. My mother, who is equipped with the kind of Jewdar that works around corners, had told me a decade earlier. Perhaps Stoppard had not understood the extent of his Jewishness until he dared to look back; all four grandparents, all murdered by the Germans, along with the extended family he never knew. Or perhaps he meant that only then had he allowed himself to consider what it might mean — which, given his fusion of life and language, meant taking on the burden of memorializing his family onstage. The result, Leopoldstadt (2020), was arch and tragic, an obituary for his family in which the Stoppard figure, an English gent, struggles to comprehend their disaster and his.
Stoppard was a champion smoker in the 20th-century fashion. The last time I saw him was on the steps of the London Library, gesticulating with fag in hand. He wore a harlequin ensemble that, in the manner of Keith Richards, particolored shoes, drainpipe black jeans, silk shirt and scarf, and a tweed coat. He broke off his conversation, flashed a smile, and said hello, then carried on as though he had never broken his rhythm. This is how Stoppard lived and how he wrote. The rhythmic ball bounces back and forth, carrying the ideas each way, and the historical combat of intellect is smoothed into perfect form. This is what art is supposed to do and what Stoppard did in his adopted homeland of language.
