Tom Stoppard (1937–2025): How the British playwright, born in Europe, rewrote the rules of theatre

Of the many terrific things Tom Stoppard is said to have done for the British stage, saving cancer patients was never, in the wildest arcadia, thought to be one. But that is apparently what happened. In a recent letter to The Times UK, Michael Baum, University College of London’s emeritus professor of surgery, recalled how a particular scene in Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) set him up for a “Damascene conversion”, which in turn led to a breakthrough in breast cancer treatment. Arcadia, which traces a certain genealogy of Chaos Theory in Romantic-era Britain, is often considered one of the finest plays about science on the modern British stage.

Hypnotised brilliance

But science was not the only reason why Stoppard made the British stage a convert to his ideas. It was always going to be language. Many years ago, a critic wrote how Stoppard’s language was an act of “hypnotised brilliance”, and no one has since found any language to contradict the same. That makes Stoppard part of a stellar line of converts himself, for he was neither English by birth nor by language. His making his adopted language his perpetual home puts him in that niche province of Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and perhaps, even Chinua Achebe.

Stoppard was also part of another quixotic lineage, if one might call it that, of authors having childhood connections with India, a lineage that includes William Thackeray and George Orwell, among others. In fact, Stoppard’s connections to what can be called a broader Indosphere are so amusing that they could have well belonged to one of his plays. He was born in 1937 as Tomáš Sträussler in the Moravian town of Zlín (then in Czechoslovakia), in a non-practising Jewish family. Once a small provincial town, Zlín became famous around the world after the Great War, thanks to just one name, Baťa.

Founder Tomáš’s half-brother, Jan Antonín Baťa’s, intuitive generosity saved the Sträusslers from Hitler’s hunt, as they fled Czechoslovakia the day the country fell to the Nazis. They first settled in Singapore, but as Singapore fell to Japan, Tomáš, his brother Petr, and their mother Martha settled in Darjeeling, where the brothers attended the American Mount Hermon School. After their father’s death in Singapore, Martha married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, and after the war, settled in Nottingham. That is how Sträussler became Stoppard, and English became his tongue. Beyond these two obvious references were a couple of others of a more quirky kind.

For many years, Stoppard’s artistic partner was Felicity Kendal, who was the daughter of Geoffrey Kendal, and sister of Jennifer (Kendall/Kapoor), and played Shashi Kapoor’s muse Lizzy Buckingham in Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah (1965), a wistful homage to a group of travelling Shakespeareans based on the Kendals’ iconic troupe. The final reference is wondrous. Among the many abiding legacies of the immortal public culture phenomenon Sholay is the play of a coin, which always landed on the same side before one of the lovable rogues could swing into action. Nothing in Sholay was really original, nor was this. So, where did this idea come from? From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard’s most famous play, which rocketed into fame in 1967, when, after a minor debut in Edinburgh, it came to The Old Vic in London. Stoppard was 30 years old and said he had suddenly woken up to fame.

After the Irishman Bernard Shaw had retreated, the great lull on the British stage was a long one, till suddenly it found itself stirred by another Irishman, Samuel Beckett, in the early 1950s. The burst of the realistic, working-class “Kitchen-sink Drama” embodied by John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, and Arnold Wesker in the mid-1950s London stage had barely waned when a particularly European kind of absurd theatre took hold. Beckett was joined by the American Edward Albee, the Romanian Eugène Ionesco, the Frenchman Jean Cocteau, and London’s own Harold Pinter, among others. The stage became the collective space for rumination that post-war (and post-Empire) Britain could perhaps be best “understood” in terms of an existential angst that was very European, and yet that didn’t seem alien on the British stage.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead most perfectly fused the two sensibilities – European lassitude and British wit – into a deliciously satiric absurd play. It took Hamlet by the collar and brought it straight into the post-war 20th century, a time so out of joint that it has barely healed since. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead took two minor characters from the most British of plays, and made them an idling pair who watched the “great action” of Hamlet exchanging jokes and wry witticisms while occasionally levitating in their own insignificance. The decisive coin, which always fell on the same side, carried the very weighty metaphor that those waylaid by power could never have their fates altered, however much they try.

It was made into a 1990 film with Richard Dreyfuss, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, which was also the only film Stoppard ever directed. Talking of films, like several other British theatre giants, Hollywood could never really comprehend Stoppard. The nearest he came to cinematic fame was when he co-scripted Shakespeare in Love, a mushy alt-history romance involving the Bard. The film, a lush period piece and a major Oscar-bait, was widely fêted in the popular awards circuits and made Stoppard famous in America. But anyone familiar with his work will know how frothy, crowd-pleasing and indulgent a work it was. Another lore about Stoppard’s disregard for quicksilver fame involves none other than Steven Spielberg. Apparently, Stoppard refused an offer to collaborate on Jaws (according to playwright David Mamet), citing work for the BBC. “So am I to understand that you are letting go of this offer because you would be writing something for BBC TV? Is that true?” Spielberg asked. Stoppard paused, and with biting brevity, replied, “No, BBC Radio!”

After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

But to know Stoppard only by Rosencrantz would be to know Shakespeare only for Hamlet. For, in play after play since the 70s, Stoppard managed to rewrite theatre rules, as much as he provided much of the blood of the British stage, winning record-breaking five Tony Awards. But he was never a recondite writer of radical plays. Stoppard was the most visible of writers. As Helen Shaw wrote in the New Yorker after his death, “When Stoppard stepped away from a nascent journalism career into the limelight in the 1960s, he became a rock-and-roll poet-prince, a Romantic hero in striped trousers and a mop of curls that got only more Byronic as he aged. His air of louche mischief attended his farces about Dada and James Joyce and moral determinism, his cleverness worn as lightly as a scarf.”

The lightly clutched cleverness was perhaps most visible in his astonishing body of work. Apart from Arcadia and Rosencrantz, one must mention the Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1972), plays in which Stoppard could make big ideas indulge in trapeze, or the later triumphs like The Coast of Utopia (2007) and Leopoldstadt (2023), the first one about a band of Russian idealists who preceded the Bolsheviks, and the second one mining his one history as a Mitteleuropean Jew. He confessed to having awakened to his own history as a once-Jewish Holocaust survivor quite late in life.

One does not know what one may attribute Stoppard’s grand reluctance to mine his Jewish past – to what The Guardian’s Michael Billington called his intellectual legerdemain, or to the fact that Stoppard remained stoically open to the world at large, a world he took delight in forging with the British stage. Either way, he emerged from several shadows – of a history of persecution, a childhood of fleeing, a youth away from London, of easily digestible popular cinema to emerge, perhaps, as the most remarkable of British playwrights after Harold Pinter.

As the great 19th-century literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, or rather the Belinsky who appeared in The Coast of Utopia, said, “Art has the right to be useless, an end in itself, for its own sake…It only has to be true. Not true to the facts, not true to appearances, but true to the innermost doll, where genius and nature are the same stuff. That’s what makes an artist moral.”

Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches at Krea University.