One of the greatest playwrights of our time is gone.
Tom Stoppard has passed away at the age of 88 in his home in Dorset. He lived a long, eventful life, a life that gave the theatre and its audiences dozens of plays and hundreds of productions around the world. Today in London, premieres of two of his plays — Indian Ink and Arcadia — are in production.
Stoppard leaves us a brilliant legacy: both his early works and his deeply personal, “mature” plays. Among them is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which premiered in ’66 at the Edinburgh Festival); Joseph Brodsky translated the play in the late 1960s, though it would be appreciated in Russia much later. And there is also the exquisite, complex, romantic, and intellectual Arcadia, inspired by Ada Lovelace, often called the first woman programmer.
Stoppard was deeply interested in history, including Russian history. It is thanks to this interest that we have the trilogy The Coast of Utopia. This vast canvas, in which Stoppard turns to the 19th century, is populated by Russian thinkers and passionate souls, revolutionaries and restless spirits. Herzen and Bakunin, Belinsky and Stankevich, Turgenev and Ogarev.
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His final play was Leopoldstadt, named after the district in Vienna where Jewish families traditionally settled. The story of the family spans from the early 20th century to the mid-1950s: the First World War, Kristallnacht, the Second World War… The premiere was scheduled for 2020 in London but was cancelled due to COVID restrictions. Leopoldstadtreturned to the stage a year later and was a triumph. The play is based on Stoppard’s own family history, and it contains many autobiographical details.
“Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable,” Tom Stoppard once said.
We thank him.
