Tom Stoppard Turned Big Ideas Into Thrilling Drama

For more than half a century, Tom Stoppard’s plays have left audiences entranced, whether those works were his earlier comedies like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound or more ambitious historical works like Arcadia and Leopoldstadt. Stoppard’s long literary career has reached its conclusion; The Guardian‘s Claire Armitstead and Chris Wiegand reported that Stoppard died on Saturday at home at the age of 88.

There is a lot to say about Stoppard and his work. In a statement released on Saturday, PEN America hailed the ways that Stoppard’s work “asked essential questions about how we live, love, die, and explore the depth of the human condition.” And his work includes multiple Tony and Olivier Award nominations and wins, plus an Academy Award for his work on the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.

Here’s the thing about Stoppard, though: yes, he could write heady, cerebral plays, but he could also create roles that abounded with life in all of its complexity. One of the most bracing stage performances I’ve ever seen was in one of Stoppard’s plays: Sinéad Cusack in the Broadway production of Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. The play reckons with grand ideas — ideology, dissent, authoritarianism and art among them — but what stands out for me, years later, is a scene in which Cusack’s character reckoned with her own mortality in the most visceral language imaginable.

That may be what made Stoppard’s work so engaging, at least for this viewer. He was eminently capable of writing expansive dramas charting intellectual history, as he did in The Coast of Utopia — but at his best, he also never lost sight of the individual lives at the heart of the political and ideological debates that fueled many of those works.

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The results of Stoppard’s writing haven’t stopped receiving acclaim. In a 2013 essay for The New Yorker, Brad Leithauser wrote, “I feel irrationally, impossibly confident that Arcadia is the finest play written in my lifetime.” But it’s also humbling to know that Arcadia‘s author took a more modest view of his craft. In a 2023 interview with TheaterMania, Stoppard offered some insights into his philosophy of writing and planning ahead. “Luckily, one doesn’t really have the view ahead when one is getting into it,” he said. “If one knew, maybe one would shy away from making the attempt.” Those, too, are words to live by.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…