Tom Stoppard (1937-2025): An Intellectual with an Entertainer’s Skill

It was in Darjeeling that Tomáš Sträussler became Tom Stoppard. The legendary British playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter, who died in Dorset on November 29 at 88, was born in Czechoslovakia which his family fled on the day the Nazis invaded as the patron of the shoe-town of Zlín in Moravia, Jan Antonín Baťa, evacuated his Jewish employees and their families to his factories outside Europe. They went to Singapore, which had its own Bata factory. When the Japanese were about to arrive, Tomáš, his mother and brother Petr fled to India, via Australia, and ended up in the Himalayan town where the boys would attend Mount Hermon school. Stoppard would later say they were known as the “Bata people”, referring to their time in Zlín but perhaps not unaware that Bata’s original factory town in India lay just south of Calcutta. More pertinently for his biography, it was in Darjeeling that his mother Martha married a British major, Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his family name and the brothers became Tom and Peter. Eugen, a doctor, had stayed behind in Singapore and died in the war in 1942. The family moved to England in 1946 with Major Stoppard and Tom began his staggered evolution into an honorary Englishman.

Sir Tom Stoppard didn’t come from the margins but the outside. He was Jewish and Central European in a society where the slightest misstep was noted if not always commented on. The experience of mainstreaming himself would work its way into his worldview, characters and plots. His best-known work Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, first staged at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival, took two of Shakespeare’s minor characters in Hamlet, the prince’s old but now distrusted friends, and put them centrestage. The major characters of Shakespeare’s play, like Hamlet himself, do come on stage in cameos but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have little understanding of what’s going on out there on the main stage or the world.

Although Stoppard first made his name with the 1963 TV broadcast of his 1960 play A Walk on the Water (retitled Enter a Free Man in 1968), his fame really began with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Although the play was initially criticised as unempathetic and flippant, emotionally cold, it began building Stoppard’s reputation for tortuous intellectual conceits and linguistic pyrotechnics marked by brilliant wit, puns, double entendres and situational ironies. Critics were reminded of not only of Samuel Beckett but of Shakespeare himself.

It was this effortless ability to entertain despite the intellectual rigour of his work that helped Stoppard easily bridge with Hollywood and across the Atlantic, where he was always in high demand as a scriptwriter and script doctor. He shared an Oscar for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love, adapted Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on a Boat for TV and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law (the 2012 film). Before that, in 1990, he directed the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern film with Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz and Tim Roth as Guildenstern. He was always sought for his skills with screenplays and many a Hollywood script would have been a disaster without his finetuning and rewriting. He even wrote most of the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade without featuring in the credits.

The breadth of Stoppard’s imagination, already evidenced in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, would be demonstrated again and again, not least in a play like Travesties (1974). Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara had all been in Zurich during World War I but it took a Stoppard to imagine the possibilities of that forgotten little fact of history. Travesties was called a Wildean fantasy and not merely because The Importance of Being Earnest plays its own role in it.

Near the end of his life, in 2020, Stoppard returned to his roots and wrote Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish quarter of early 20^th-century Vienna. The play won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later, four Tonys. Stoppard has explored most things a single creative mind could, from quantum physics to mathematics and thermodynamics and espionage, in his oeuvre. He famously said that he wrote to understand his thoughts.

Knighted in 1997 for his services to literature, Sir Tom Stoppard was a Central European in his intellectual bearing, possessing that peculiar ability to laugh at oneself of Mitteleuropa’s heimatlose Emigranten. But he was also an Englishman who loved his cricket.