{"id":58678,"date":"2025-11-29T21:29:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=58678"},"modified":"2025-11-30T02:57:45","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T02:57:45","slug":"tom-stoppard-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/tom-stoppard-has-died\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Stoppard Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 1990\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-f6gON_OMcQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><br>Stoppard leaves us a brilliant legacy: both his early works and his deeply personal, \u201cmature\u201d plays. Among them is <em>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/em> (which premiered in \u201966 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 <em>Arcadia<\/em>, inspired by Ada Lovelace, often called the first woman programmer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Stoppard was deeply interested in history, including Russian history. It is thanks to this interest that we have the trilogy <em>The Coast of Utopia<\/em>. 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.<br>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Leopoldstadt | Official Trailer | National Theatre Live\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kPOlOIo2zBY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>His final play was <em>Leopoldstadt<\/em>, 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\u2026 The premiere was scheduled for 2020 in London but was cancelled due to COVID restrictions. <em>Leopoldstadt<\/em>returned to the stage a year later and was a triumph. The play is based on Stoppard\u2019s own family history, and it contains many autobiographical details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cFreedom can\u2019t 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,\u201d Tom Stoppard once said.<br>We thank him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the greatest playwrights of our time is gone.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 Indian Ink and Arcadia \u2014 are in production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":58677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[],"class_list":["post-58678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58678"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=58678"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=58678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}