Tom Stoppard's Radical Invitation

"When Tom Stoppard died, on November 29th, at the age of eighty-eight, he left behind a theatre changed by his blistering intellect and blazing success, the heat and light that made the rest of our English-language garden grow. You might say that Shakespeare has his points, or that Samuel Beckett had his day. But Stoppard's enviable gifts-"his looks, his talents, his money and his luck," as the playwright and memoirist Simon Gray said-made him our current theatre's primary influence, even in such vivid company."

"By any measure, Stoppard's achievements are astounding. He is the only playwright to win five Tony Awards for Best Play: for " Leopoldstadt," in 2023; for the three parts of " The Coast of Utopia," in 2007; for " The Real Thing," in 1984; for " Travesties,&quot, in 1976; and for " Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,&quot, in 1968. (That he didn't win in 1995 for " Arcadia,&quot, one of the greatest plays ever written, is delightfully appropriate"

"After his mother married a British major following her first husband's death, the family moved to Nottingham, and Stoppard became the standard-bearer for a certain kind of Englishness. He learned late in life that many members of his family died in the Holocaust. Even in his eighties, he was entering new territory, writing about his recently discovered Jewish heritage in "Leopoldstadt,&quot, and embarking on what might have been the third or fourth renaissance of his style."

Tom Stoppard transformed English-language theatre through sharp intellect, formal daring, and sustained commercial and critical success. He won five Tony Awards for Best Play across decades, producing landmark works including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, The Coast of Utopia, and Leopoldstadt. Born Tomáš Sträussler in Moravia, he emigrated with his family to Singapore and later to England, adopting a public persona associated with Englishness. He discovered late in life Jewish family losses in the Holocaust and, in later decades, explored that heritage onstage. He also worked in film, writing screenplays and engaging with wider cultural forms.

Read at The New Yorker