Tom Stoppard, the Erudite Entertainer, Was Part of the Luck We Had

Just under a year after the death of the late, great playwright Tom Stoppard, the first New York production to take place, of his masterpiece “The Invention of Love,” will be staged off-Broadway between September 17 and October 3, directed by Zachary Elkind. It is, of course, too brief a run, but it remains to be seen whether New York audiences can fully absorb the complexities of the play, which touches on everything from the British poet A.E. Housman and Gilbert and Sullivan to the disparity between classical literature and Victorian repression. Nonetheless, with the casting of David Greenspan, an eight-time Obie winner, in the lead role of Housman (or ‘AEH’ as he is referred to in the play), it promises to be quite a night.In any case, it will double admirably as a tribute to its creator. There aren’t many writers who can be described as world-conquering geniuses, but Stoppard — playwright, polymath, Wildean wit and ferocious autodidact — was one of the remarkably few who fitted such a description. From his emergence in 1967 with the first Broadway production of his Hamlet-aping hit “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which duly ran for a year, right up until his final 2020 play “Leopoldstadt,” which premiered in New York in 2022 and won every major award it was eligible for, Stoppard enjoyed a degree of good fortune that would have been sickening, even reprehensible, if it had befallen anyone else.That he was a man who combined a near-indecent amount of sexual charisma with Wildean literary genius meant that he was adept at seducing audiences of both sexes. Like Henry, the three-quarters-autobiographical protagonist of his 1982 play “The Real Thing,” Stoppard had an offstage penchant for actresses. Two of his highest-profile relationships, with Felicity Kendal and Sinead Cusack, were conducted with the stars of his plays. That the latter entanglement took place while Cusack was married to Jeremy Irons, who had starred in “The Real Thing” on Broadway as Henry — and was apparently conducted with Irons’s assent and approval, presumably as he pursued his own extramarital assignations — was a Pirandellian degree of complexity that would have done credit to one of Stoppard’s dense, witty and deeply audience-friendly dramas.Although Stoppard has traditionally been seen as a very English playwright, such a description of him is only partly accurate. For a start, he was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, the son of a doctor and his wife. After his father died when his son was only four or five — the ship he was on was bombed by the Japanese as he attempted to flee Singapore in 1942 — Sträussler’s mother Martha remarried an English major, Kenneth Stoppard, and Tomáš Sträussler became Tom — never Thomas — Stoppard. He later described himself, with typically Stoppardian wit, as a “bounced Czech.” This sense of dislocation, and of being an all-too-observant alien in whatever world he found himself in, was one that lay at the heart of his writing.The upcoming production of ‘The Invention of Love’ at Theaterlab. TheaterlabIt was at a funeral service in 1980 for the critic Kenneth Tynan — a man who relocated himself and his family from London to California in the erroneous belief that he was about to begin a career in the film industry there before dying of emphysema aged 53 — that Stoppard delivered what would become one of his defining statements. Addressing Tynan’s family, he said “For those of us who shared his time your father was part of the luck we had”. He spoke from the heart — it was Tynan’s championing of “Rosencrantz,” while he was employed by Laurence Olivier’s nascent National Theater in London, that had ignited his meteoric career — but there was also the faint sense of self-regard lurking just behind his warm, emotional comments.By then, he was one of the best-known writers working on both sides of the Atlantic. His major plays, which included “Jumpers” and “Travesties,” had been huge hits, making him an extremely wealthy man — in one much-quoted remark, when asked what “Jumpers, “a farce about moral philosophy, was about, he replied “It’s about to make me very rich” – and he had begun to diversify into screenwriting to lucrative, if not always artistically satisfying, effect. The 43-year old Stoppard was at the peak of his artistic influence, someone who had skillfully synthesized British self-deprecation with American pizzazz and chutzpah.Although he never relocated either to the East or West Coast — and he is one of the few writers who was equally at home on both shores — Stoppard became one of the most sought-after and best-paid Hollywood script doctor of his generation, whose lucrative forays into Tinseltown did nothing to diminish his artistic standing. He could go and earn millions rewriting “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” for Steven Spielberg, and then win awards for his 1993 play “Arcadia,” which Vincent Canby saluted in the New York Times by saying that it was “Tom Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion.” Stoppard was a writer who excelled at the high and the low alike. If you wanted him as the adept translator of Chekhov and Pirandello, or the playwright of ideas whose joyous yoking of apparently disparate highbrow subjects together might combine, for instance, Byron and chaos theory, or academic philosophy and gymnastics, you were the perfect first-night Broadway audience. But if you were a resident of Boise, Idaho who wanted to be entertained in a less cerebral fashion, then you could laugh yourself silly at his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, written under the auspices of the disgraced Harvey Weinstein and imbued with a steady stream of jokes about the film business and its venal producers and vain actors. These went hand-in-hand with the loftier Shakespeare allusions that played just as nicely to discerning Manhattan moviegoers.Or, alternatively, you could enjoy his wit at a degree of remove thanks to his script doctoring additions to film as otherwise undistinguished as “102 Dalmatians,” in which Glenn Close’s Cruella de Vil spits out the splendidly Stoppardian line, “You may have won the battle, but I’ll win the wardrobe!” A decade earlier, Stoppard had also tried his hand at directing, helming the film adaptation of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” The picture, starring Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss, won the Golden Lion prize at the 1990 Venice Film Festival, beating the likes of Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” yet it remained the only feature film Stoppard directed.Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’ Wikimedia CommonsCertainly, there will be those who attempt to belittle Stoppard’s achievements in the theater as smoke and mirrors of the highest kind, where lavish productions with great actors made up for a certain sketchiness in the writing. When I saw a new London staging of “The Invention of Love” in January 2025, for instance, I was struck by how flat and undramatic much of it was, with actors simply orating to the audience rather than talking to one another. We can only hope that Mr. Elkind’s off-Broadway production can be as dynamic on the stage as the play is on the page.America was often kinder to Stoppard than Britain was. Perhaps this was because there was a skepticism about a non-Oxbridge intellectual in his adopted country that was equal parts snobbishness and suspicion, and perhaps because his charisma and charm found a more natural home in the salons of the Upper East Side than they did in Mayfair and Chelsea, although he was one of the most sought-after additions to any dining table wherever he went in the world. When his trilogy “The Coast of Utopia” premiered in London in 2002, it was received with respect but without warmth, but its first production in New York in 2006 saw it acclaimed as a masterpiece which duly swept the Tonys the following year, winning seven. Lincoln Center Theater even created bespoke cocktails for the occasion—“Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” and “Salvage”—named for the three plays in the trilogy.Yet it’s that line that Stoppard delivered at Tynan’s funeral that I’ve kept coming back to since he died. 45 years separated his oration and his own death in Dorset, England, but he must have already known that, barring some disaster or shift in fashion, his own legacy was assured. Like his friend Mick Jagger, he has continued to be a transatlantic inspiration for millions throughout his long, happy life, and his plays will, I believe, be staged and loved as long as theater continues to exist. If I was to say anything to Stoppard’s family now, it would be to repeat their father’s comments from all those years ago, and to remark that sharing the world with Tom Stoppard for all those years was part of the luck that we all had. How grateful we should be for such an opportunity.

Tom Stoppard, the Erudite Entertainer, Was Part of the Luck We Had

Tom Stoppard, the Erudite Entertainer, Was Part of the Luck We Had

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