Tom Stoppard – Playwright
Born July 3, 1937; died November 29, 2025
Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was a playwright of linguistic verve, wild theatricality and an inherent sense of intellectual playfulness that blew the mainstream British stage wide open following the success of his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard’s work continued to dazzle right up to what turned out to be his final and infinitely more personal work, the 41-actor epic, Leopoldstadt.
Inbetween came a vast catalogue of work. This ranged from the intellectual riot of Travesties (1974), which looked at the possibilities that might have ensued from the fact that Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara had all spent time in Zurich during World War One. With Joyce in the midst of writing Ulysses, Tzara in the thick of Dada’s rise, and Lenin at the vanguard of the Russian Revolution, Stoppard depicted a world about to explode on every level. More overtly politically, perhaps, Rock’n’Roll (2006) was set during the musical and political ferment of the 1960s, and contrasted events in Cambridge and Prague.
Despite his Czech roots, Stoppard seemed to represent a form of English theatre that resisted polemic for a slyer kind of subversion. Stoppard’s world was one where love and revolution of one kind of another co-existed with an at times dazzling sense of serious fun. This was as evident in early plays like The Real Inspector Hound (1968) and Jumpers (1972) as it was in later works such as Arcadia (1993).
As he became more active politically by way of Charter 77, Index on Censorship and other human rights based organisations, Stoppard tapped into his own roots in works such as Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), a play for actors and orchestra created with composer Andre Previn; and TV plays, Professional Foul (1977) and Squaring the Circle (1984). These helped go some way to dispel the prevailing perception of Stoppard as an absurdist clever-clogs he never quite managed to shake off.
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler to Martha Beckova and Eugen Straussler in Zlin, in the Moravia region of Czechoslovakia. The Straussler’s were non-observant Jews, and just before Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, the family fled to Singapore. In 1941, prior to the Japanese occupation of Singapore the following year, Stoppard, his brother and mother were sent to Australia. His father, a British army volunteer, remained behind, and died a prisoner of war when Stoppard was four. The rest of the family were evacuated to Darjeeling, India, where the two boys attended an American multi-racial school. In 1945, Beckova married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England.
The newly anglicised Tom Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire and Pocklington School in East Riding, Yorkshire. Stoppard left school aged seventeen, and became a journalist on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. He stayed for four years before the Bristol Evening World offered him the post of feature writer, humour columnist and secondary drama critic.
Stoppard wrote short radio plays, and his first stage work, originally called A Walk on the Water, got him an agent, a production in Germany and a TV production. The play was later developed into Enter a Free Man (1968). In London, Stoppard reviewed for Scene magazine as the Evelyn Waugh inspired William Boot, and in 1964 won a grant that enabled him to spend five months in a Berlin mansion, where he wrote a one-act version of what would eventually become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
The play was originally seen in a production by the Oxford Theatre Group at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This led to a London production by the National Theatre at the Old Vic. The production was remounted on Broadway, where it ran for a year and was nominated for eight Tony awards. Stoppard wrote his sole novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon the same year, but it was his dramatic work that immediately elevated him to be feted by both national institutions and commercial stages.
Stoppard’s private life only occasionally seeped into his work. He was married three times. His first, to Josie Ingle, ran parallel with his early successes from 1965 to 1972. His second, to Miriam Stern, lasted from 1972 to 1992. The marriage ended when Stoppard had a relationship with actress Felicity Kendal, who appeared in the first production of Stoppard’s adultery-based comedy, The Real Thing (1982). In 2014, Stoppard married for a third time, to Sabrina Guinness.
Beyond the stage, Stoppard scripted or co-scripted several Hollywood blockbusters, including Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Enigma (2001). Stoppard also worked uncredited on blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005).
In the 1990s, Stoppard discovered that both sets of his grandparents had been Jewish, and died in Nazi concentration camps. This fed into his epic 2020 play, Leopoldstadt, which focussed on the lives of a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955.
After opening in January 2020 on the West End at Wyndham's Theatre, London, Leopoldstadt was postponed in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The play nevertheless won Stoppard the 2020 Olivier Award for Best New Play. It opened on Broadway in 2022, and has been seen in numerous productions abroad. Shortly after Leopoldstadt was first seen came the publication of Tom Stoppard: A Life (2020), Hermione Lee’s biography of Stoppard, which the playwright had asked her to write in 2013. Together, Lee’s book and Stoppard’s final work seemed to bookend a life rich in experience and discovery, and one that changed the face of contemporary drama forever.
Stoppard won numerous awards, including the 2013 PEN Pinter Prize, given for ‘determination to tell things as they are.’
Stoppard is survived by his wife, Sabrina Guinness and four sons; Oliver and Barnaby, from his first marriage to Josie Ingle; and Ed and Will, from his second, to Miriam Stern.
The Herald, December 30th 2025
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