Tom Stoppard, playwright who dazzled with verbal gymnastics, dies aged 88

By Barbara Lewis, Reuters Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP "What's it about?" was a frequent response from bemused theatre-goers to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard's first stage triumph. Tired of being asked, Stoppard is said to have replied to a woman outside a theatre on Broadway: "It's about to make me very rich." He later questioned whether he had said "very", Hermione Lee writes in Stoppard's authorised biography, but he had undoubtedly managed to transform his previously precarious finances. For every puzzled spectator, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant wordplay and sheer daring of a young playwright who had turned Shakespeare inside out and placed the spotlight, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters from the same play. First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the following year, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead made Stoppard, at the age of 29, the youngest playwright to be staged at the National Theatre in London. From there, the play went to Broadway and had more than 250 productions worldwide over its first decade. Stoppard's career flourished for decades more, embracing stage, screen and radio, and demonstrating his thirst to tackle any subject - from mathematics to Dadaist art to landscape gardening. His final play, Leopoldstadt, first performed in 2020, follows the story of a Jewish family in Vienna inspired by his own history. Stoppard's many other successes included The Real Inspector Hound, which parodied stage whodunnits and sent up theatre critics, Jumpers, a 1.5 million word epic that delighted and confused its public, and Night and Day, a satire on the British media. His densely packed, intricately constructed plays were based on extensive research. Arcadia, in 1993, considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, blended chaos theory, Isaac Newton and the poet Lord Byron's love life. The word Stoppardian - first recorded in 1978 - meanwhile entered the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the use of verbal gymnastics while addressing philosophical concepts. The honours he won at home and abroad included an Oscar for co-authoring the screenplay of the 1998 hit film Shakespeare in Love, and a record five Tony awards for Best Play. In 1997, he was knighted for his contributions to theatre. He died at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family, his agent said on Saturday (US Time). The cause was not immediately known. 'Incredibly lucky' Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July, 1937, in what was then Czechoslovakia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse. The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant. Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese. In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England. Boarding school followed at Pocklington in Yorkshire, northern England, where Tom Stoppard loved cricket more than drama and learned how to be British, which Major Stoppard considered the ultimate nationality. The adult Stoppard, who rediscovered decades later the Jewish roots that he explored in his final play, would accuse his stepfather of "an innate antisemitism". He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life," he wrote in Talk, a US magazine, in 1999, reflecting on returning with his brother to their birthplace Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic. Photo: ANGELA WEISS/AFP 'Intellect and emotion are bedfellows' Despite showing academic prowess at school, Stoppard decided not to go to university. Instead, he went straight to work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol, western England. "I wanted to be a great journalist," Stoppard later said. "My first ambition was to be lying on the floor of an African airport while machine-gun bullets zoomed over my typewriter. But I wasn't much use as a reporter. I felt I didn't have the right to ask people questions. "I always thought they'd throw the teapot at me or call the police." While he found reporting daunting, he threw himself into working as a theatre and cinema critic, and his love of drama took hold. He began making the influential friendships with actors and other writers that would shape his career. He made up his mind to move to London and start writing plays. Success only ensued after dogged persistence and sleepless nights spent chain-smoking and wrestling with writer's block. One of Britain's most established critics, Michael Billington, who reported on every Stoppard first night for half a...

Tom Stoppard, playwright who dazzled with verbal gymnastics, dies aged 88

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