Tom Stoppard

(3 July 1937 to 29 November 2025)

Playwright Tom Stoppard was a signal for wit, intellect, complexity of life and ideas, and verbal virtuosity, even when he was in ‘speech-writing’ mode.

His first major play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a riff on the treacherous school chums of Hamlet, made his name (although Harold Bloom described the play as “Beckett obsessed”). When asked by a theatregoer in New York, “What is it about?” he reportedly replied: “It’s about to earn me a great deal of money.”

Better plays include Travesties (1974), where characters such as James Joyce and the Lenins airily spout and pout, including in limericks – a surreal take on Soviet realism; the emotional bombshell of The Real Thing (1982) (image below), and Arcadia (1993), when Tom made mathematics sexy and biography dead. Craig Raine, reviewing Hermione Lee’s biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, mentions a moment not in the book, but recorded by Richard Eyre: “..after a performance of Arcadia in New York, a woman came up and was a hydrant of praise. Stoppard thanked her politely. After she had gone, he turned to Eyre: ‘Why don’t they ever offer you a blow job?‘”

Clive James created a character in his novel, Brilliant Creatures, that was based on Stoppard: he “wrote plays at such an intellectual altitude that only a symbolic logician could follow the plots.”

King Charles, on Stoppard’s death, issued a statement, which included the following: “A dear friend who wore his genius lightly, he could, and did, turn his pen to any subject, challenging, moving and inspiring his audiences, borne from his own personal history. We send our most heartfelt sympathy to his beloved family. Let us all take comfort in his immortal line: “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.””