Sir Tom Stoppard: Witty and playful writer who took ideas seriously

Sir Tom Stoppard was one of Britain’s cleverest playwrights. His writing was witty and playful, he took ideas seriously and delighted in philosophical and political argument.

He had a parallel career as a Hollywood script doctor, much in demand to add sparkle to others’ film scripts, and shared a best-screenplay Oscar for his entertaining contribution to Shakespeare in Love.

He was a writer who managed to combine an intellectual’s delight in complexity with an entertainer’s talent for having fun.

Plays like Arcadia, Jumpers and the work which first made his name, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, were sometimes criticised for lacking emotional depth, for being too much show and too little substance.

But his later work displayed greater human sympathy, even if it was sometimes coolly received by the critics.

Perhaps his particular qualities as a playwright reflected his background: part Mitteleuropean intellectual, part self-deprecating, public-school educated, cricket-loving Englishman.

He was born Tomas Straussler on 3 July 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, where his Jewish father worked as a doctor for the Bata shoe company. His parents fled from imminent Nazi occupation when he was still a baby and went to Singapore, where his father died in a Japanese prison camp.

Tom and his mother and brother had escaped ahead of the Japanese invasion and went first to Australia, later to India. There his mother met and married an Englishman, a Major Stoppard.

Stoppard became a journalist, initially on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. An early break came in 1963 when his first stage play A Walk on the Water (later retitled Enter a Free Man) was broadcast on ITV.

But the play that really catapulted him to fame was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 and transferred to London’s National Theatre in 1967.

It took two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and put them centre stage, baffled and bewildered by the seemingly arbitrary events swirling around them.

It was brilliant: like Samuel Beckett, but with much better jokes.

He followed it with a succession of intensely theatrical divertissements, often revolving around unexpected intellectual conceits or bizarre juxtapositions and featuring brilliant dialogue, puns, repartee, double meanings and misunderstandings.

Jumpers was a play about academic philosophy and gymnastics. Travesties was set in Zurich during World War One and featured Lenin, James Joyce, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde – to whose bright, brittle and self-consciously clever plays Stoppard’s were sometimes compared.

Later in his career, in similar vein, he wrote Hapgood, a play about espionage and quantum physics, and Arcadia, about mathematics, thermodynamics, literature, and landscape gardening. He claimed to write plays as much to discover what he really thought as to explore his existing ideas.

He also wrote for radio. If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank imagined the speaking clock as a real woman speaking live, her internal monologue utterly at odds with the deadening repetitiveness of endlessly intoning “at the third stroke…”. Albert’s Bridge was about a man painting a bridge, with philosophy and mathematics thrown in.

As the years passed, his writing became more serious, more political and more empathetic.

“I slowly learned that plays work best if you let them have some blood heat, and not simply be exciting exchanges of witty ideas,” he told Joan Bakewell in a revealing interview in 2002.

“It’s the humanity of the characters that gives theatre the possibility of being great art.”

So Night and Day was about journalism and its purposes; the Real Thing was about love and infidelity and starred Felicity Kendal, for whom Stoppard left his second wife, the doctor and broadcaster Miriam Stoppard.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour put a symphony orchestra on stage alongside the actors in a savage satire which dramatised the plight of Soviet dissidents locked away in mental hospitals.

“I have no symptoms, I have opinions,” a patient says at one point.

“Your opinions are your symptoms. Your disease is dissent,” replies his doctor. It was the sort of paradox Stoppard loved to explore.

The Coast of Utopia was a massive trilogy about the 19th Century Russian liberal thinker, Alexander Herzen: coolly received at the National Theatre in London, it was a huge success in New York.

And Rock’n’Roll was about the stifling repression of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

His plays displayed considerable erudition.

“I always wanted to know about a lot of things, but not particularly deeply,” he told Joan Bakewell.

“I like facts, I like knowledge, I like having wide interests. There’s various ways of describing such a person, dilettante might be one way and polymath might be another.”

“To write a play at all I do have to get hold of that fix, that charge, that juice which comes from getting really, really interested in a small area – it might be a scientific thing, it might be a philosophical thing, it might be an historical thing – but a real unforced, uncontainable fascination for something, from which everything else then becomes a play.”

Sir Tom was a successful screenwriter as well as a playwright. Several of his plays, notably Professional Foul, which was born of his engagement with the Czech dissident movement Charter 77, were originally written for television.

He adapted Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat for television, co-wrote Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy Brazil, supplied much of the dialogue for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (though he wasn’t credited) and adapted John Le Carre, Tolstoy and Robert Harris for the screen. And in 1998 he shared a best screenplay Oscar for his contribution to Shakespeare in Love.

He was knighted in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit in 2000. In 2014, he married his third wife, heiress and television producer Sabrina Guinness.

As he grew older, he claimed, the writing process grew no easier.

“Each time I’m in this leaky boat I go through this ridiculous exercise of trying to remember how I got hold of the last play. And I never do remember,” he told one interviewer.

“I cannot remember now how I got into Rock’n’Roll, I wish I could, I’d do it again. But in the absence of anything to go on I just sort of read the papers, chat to people, hang about and worry about it before I go to sleep.”