There’s a hole in my heart.  Slowly, inexorably, depressingly, one by one, my literary heroes pass away.  The latest, Tom Stoppard, generally regarded as the greatest living English playwright, died November 29, 2025, at age 88.  And before him, Tom Wolfe (2018), Terry Teachout (2022), and Paul Johnson (2023).

Tom Stoppard had a way with words and cherished them.  In his play The Real Thing, the playwright character utters this plea, “Words … They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more … I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

Those who value Stoppard’s words will be quoting him long after his death.

Stoppardian

A dramatist and Czech-born, Englishman, Tom Stoppard is far from a household name in America.  He wrote intellectual plays of wit and humor, and farcical plays of intellectual intrigue.  He didn’t write musicals or comedies, so many, probably most, have never seen his plays in theaters.  Stoppard wrote plays, “because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.”  Contradiction and conceptual enigmas were his stock in trade, though always delivered with dry comedic wit to drive the story.  The adjective, Stoppardian, entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978.

I first encountered Tom Stoppard 50 years ago – with a pair of offerings at Seattle’s Second Stage.  I was enrolled in The Living Theater, a class whose students were expected to attend at least seven live performances on campus or off.  I invited my Mom to join me for a double-feature of two short Stoppard plays, After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound.  What we saw was both surreal and absurd, which led me to write a lengthy review trying to capture in detail the experience of the event.  Stoppard believed that theater is an event, for which words and script are but a movable and changing part.

With each new Stoppard play I saw, The Real Thing, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Arcadia, Rock ‘n Roll, Leopoldstadt, or audio-plays I heard, Darkside, The Hard Problem, In the Native State, Albert’s Bridge, or Professional Foul, the greater my admiration grew.  His most accessible work is no doubt Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 film whose script won Stoppard an Academy Award.

But for me, his 1993 stage play, Arcadia takes the cake.  I’ve seen it staged three times and listened to several audio versions.  Set on an estate in rural Derbyshire, England, the play examines its owners, the Coverly family, in both 1809 and their present-day descendants.  Arcadia is an exploration of determinism and chaos theory, love and literature, Lord Byron, lust, and the falsity of biography.  As with all of Stoppard’s plays, it’s really about the characters who inhabit the stage, delivering lines that help the audience to first think, then understand, and later feel.  It’s a multi-layered drama filled with romance, humor, tragedy, sorrow, science, rice puddings, and a tortoise.  The L.A. Theatre Works audio staging of this nearly three-hour play will introduce you to entropy and mathematics, but in a way that is fun and cleverly explained.

One of Stoppard’s most intriguing and accessible pieces is Darkside, a radio play that conceptualizes one interpretation behind the meaning of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.   Stoppard received the band’s blessing to use their music at the soundtrack for his drama.  Darkside was released in 2013 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a best-selling album that stayed on the Billboard 200 for almost 15 years.  The story follows Emily McCoy, a philosophy student as she travels through a series of thought experiments vividly brought to life by the characters she encounters, and seeks to answer the question, “What is the good?”

I could share a dozen quotes to conclude this tribute, but have settled on just one, fittingly from his 1967 breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.”

Afterword and Looking After

Theaters were really devastated by Covid-19, and as a result, fewer plays are staged, with musicals and crowd-pleasers the staple.  Tom Stoppard’s works are still occasionally performed in England, but not often in the U.S.  Jennifer and I were fortunate to have seen his last play, Leopoldstadt, the story behind his Jewish roots on Broadway in 2022.  But locally, there hasn’t been a staging of any of his plays since 2014, that I’m aware of.

Yet there are ways to listen to his dramas, foremost among them, Tom Stoppard – A BBC Radio Collection featuring 14 plays.  His 54-minute radio play, Darkside, is easily found on YouTube and elsewhere.  L.A. Theatre Works has staged audio versions of three productions, including excellent adaptations of Arcadia, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. They are available through Libby or your library.  Only one of his plays has been filmed, a 1990 version of Rosencrantz, starring Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss. Plus, there’s always the film, Shakespeare in Love, while not totally his own, it’s a satisfying representation of the Stoppard style.

Prized Possession

Several years ago, we stopped at the Half Price Books in Tukwila and browsed.  I found this used copy of Rosencrantz at an attractive price of $8.00, so bought it.  For a couple of years, it collected dust on a nightstand filled with other volumes I haven’t yet read.  It wasn’t until I packed it along on an extended trip and finally read it.  Enthused, I began to read it again but was struck by the introductory page.  Was that a real autograph, or just stamped artwork?  Felt pen stain-marks bleeding through to the opposite side proved it was real.

Unwittingly, without trying, and by pure chance, I purchased an autographed copy the U.S. printing of the 1967 play that launched Stoppard’s career.

But of course, Tom Stoppard said it best as a line in this very play, “Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”