Tom Stoppard (1937–2025)
Author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
About the Author
When the National Theatre needed a last-minute substitute for a canceled production of As You Like It, Kenneth Tynan decided to stage Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a work by an unfamiliar author that had received discouraging notices from provincial critics at its Edinburgh Festival debut. show more Of course, the play, when it opened in April 1967, met with universal acclaim. In New York the next year, it was chosen best play by the Drama Critics Circle. In such an unlikely way, Tom Stoppard came to light. Born in Czechoslovakia, a country he left (for Singapore) when he was an infant, he began his literary career as a journalist in Bristol, where play reviewing led to playwriting. After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard's reputation suffered through the production of a number of minor works, whose intellectual preoccupations were shrugged off by reviewers: Enter a Free Man (1968; "an adolescent twinge of a play," N.Y. Times), The Real Inspector Hound (1968; "lightweight," N.Y. Times), and After Magritte. But in the 1970s, the initial enthusiasms aroused by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were more than vindicated by the production of two full-length plays, Jumpers (1974) and the antiwar play Travesties (1975), whose immense verbal and theatrical inventiveness made them absolute successes on both sides of the Atlantic. Stoppard's method from the start has been to contrive explanations for highly unlikely encounters---of objects (the ironing board, old lady, and bowler hat of After Magritte), characters (Joyce, Lenin, and Tzara in Travesties), and even plays (Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Importance of Being Earnest, Travesties, and The Real Thing, 1982). In the 1970s, Tynan called for Stoppard---as a Czech and as an artist---to engage himself politically. But although political subjects have since found their way into pieces from Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977) to Squaring the Circle (1985), politics and art seem to have become just two more of the playwright's irreconcilables, which meet, but never join, in the logical frames of his comedy. The presence of political material---such as the Lenin sections that nearly ruin the second part of Travesties---has occasionally strained the structure of the plays. But in The Real Thing Stoppard is comfortable enough with the satire on art and activism to bring a third subject, love, into the mix. Stoppard has acknowledged his Eastern European heritage nonpolitically, in a series of adaptations of plays by Arthur Schnitzler (see Vol. 2), Johann Nestroy, and Ferenc Molnar. (Bowker Author Biography) Tom Stoppard is the author of many plays, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, and The Invention of Love. He lives in London. (Publisher Provided) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
(dut) The author was born as Tomas Straussler. After the death of his father, his mother married the Brittish Major Stoppard, and Tom since accepted his name.
Image credit: Tom Stoppard, on 13 novembre 2006
Series
Works by Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard Plays 5 : Arcadia + Hapgood + Indian Ink + Night & Day + The Real Thing (1999) 447 copies, 5 reviews
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead [1990 film] (1990) — Director; Screenwriter — 133 copies, 1 review
Where Are They Now? 5 copies
Fifty Years on Stage [2013 TV movie] — Author — 3 copies
Galileo 3 copies
The Dog It Was That Died 2 copies
Toplu Oyunları 2: Aşkın İcadı / Akrobatlar / Hapgood / Merdivenden İnen Saantçı / Kasti Faul 2 copies
M is for Moon Among Other Things 2 copies
Arcadia: Arena Stage 1 copy
TOPLU OYUNLARI 3 1 copy
TOPLU OYUNLARI 1 1 copy
Teeth 1 copy
Dirty Linen 1 copy
Another Moon Called Earth 1 copy
Neutral Ground 1 copy
New-Found-Land 1 copy
Dogg's Hamlet 1 copy
Cahoot's Macbeth 1 copy
Associated Works
The Actor's Book of Contemporary Stage Monologues: More Than 150 Monologues from More Than 70 Playwrights (1987) — Contributor — 193 copies
Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100 (2011) — Contributor — 132 copies, 4 reviews
The Pleasure of Reading: 43 Writers on the Discovery of Reading and the Books That Inspired Them (2015) — Contributor — 104 copies, 2 reviews
Die englische Literatur 10 in Text und Darstellung. 20. Jahrhundert 2. (2001) — Contributor — 6 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Sträussler, Tomáš (birth)
- Other names
- Boot, William
- Birthdate
- 1937-07-03
- Date of death
- 2025-11-29
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Mount Hermon School
Dolphin School, Nottinghamshire, England, UK
Pocklington School, Yorkshire, England, UK - Occupations
- playwright
screenwriter
translator
journalist
drama critic - Organizations
- Western Daily Press (reporter ∙ critic)
Bristol Evening World (feature writer ∙ humor columnist ∙ drama critic)
BBC Radio
Standpoint
Shakespeare Schools Festival
Index on Censorship (show all 9)
Amnesty International
Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse
The London Library (president) - Awards and honors
- John Whiting Award (1967)
Royal Society of Literature (Fellow, 1972)
Order of the British Empire (Commander, 1978)
Knight Bachelor (1997)
Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay, 1998)
Golden Globe (Best Screenplay, 1998) (show all 24)
American Theater Hall of Fame (1999)
BAFTA (Best Original Screenplay, 1999)
Order of Merit (2000)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (2000)
Honorary doctorate, Yale University (2000)
Honorary degree, Cambridge University (2000)
The London Library (2002)
Dan David Prize (2008)
PEN Pinter prize (2013)
Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement (2013)
PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award (2015)
British Academy (Honorary Fellow, , 2017)
David Cohen Prize (2017)
America Award in Literature (2017)
Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award (2017)
Laurence Olivier Award (1994, 2006, 2020)
Tony Award for Best Play (1968, 1976, 1984, 2007, 2023)
Honorary Patronage, University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin - Agent
- Anthony Jones (PFD)
- Relationships
- Stoppard, Miriam (wife|divorced)
- Short biography
- Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Straussler to a Jewish family in Zlín, Czechoslovakia. With their parents Eugen Straussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company, and Martha Becková, he and his brother fled the country in 1939 to escape Nazi occupation. \The family went to Singapore, where Bata had a factory. Tom, his mother and brother fled to Australia in 1941. Tom spent three years in a boarding school in Darjeeling, India. In 1945, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard. Tom attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later Pocklington School in Yorkshire. He left school at age 17 and began working as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol. IHe also wrote short radio plays and in 1960, moved to London and launched himself as a playwright with A Walk on the Water, later re-titled Enter a Free Man.
- Nationality
- Czechoslovakia
UK - Birthplace
- Zlín, Czechoslovakia
- Places of residence
- Zlín, Czechoslovakia (birth)
Singapore
Darjeeling, India
Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, UK
London, England, UK - Place of death
- Dorset, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
- Disambiguation notice
- The author was born as Tomas Straussler. After the death of his father, his mother married the Brittish Major Stoppard, and Tom since accepted his name.
Members
Reviews
Works like this are proof that the boundary between fanfiction and independent art is completely arbitrary, and perhaps totally meaningless. Yes, this play is a derivative work of Hamlet, but not only does it not really require you to have read its famous forebear (although you certainly should, for many reasons beyond giving this some context), but Stoppard's reflections on mortality, chance, and the contingency of life stand on their own. There is no reason whatsoever that philosophy can't show more be funny, and even on the page the dialogue and action is hilarious, as poor old R & G wander through this frequently metafictional work that fills in the gaps of Hamlet, meeting their ultimate fate in a way that's both inevitable given what happens without their knowledge in Hamlet as well as poignant purely on its own. I could go on and on about how skillfully Stoppard uses tropes like the play-within-a-play, or how he nods to other famous existentialist works like Waiting For Godot, but this is about as close to a perfect comic play as it gets these days. show less
Hamlet retold through the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two extremely minor characters who end up dead for no particular reason. Stoppard uses this rich canvas to closely examine themes of time, memory, and mortality. What is it like to be caught up in the torrent of a story and to be swept along without choice or understanding. There is much to relate to in this absurd, surreal, and thoughtful play.
Tom Stoppard writes witty, upside down plays from odd perspectives, and this is one of them. R & G, minor characters from Hamlet, are the focus here, and the events in Hamlet are viewed from their perspective. It's a comedy and one of the running jokes is that no-one can figure out which is R and which is G. There is some question as to whether the whole play is a flashback and R & G are already dead, or whether they simply cannot avoid their fate. I enjoyed the scene on the boat (when they show more are sailing with Hamlet to England) the most. Occasionally the fourth wall is broken. The play begins with a coin toss--and the question throughout the play is: rigged or chance. Another question the play confronts: how real is the theater? And its opposite: how real is life? show less
The second in his Coast of Utopia trilogy, Shipwreck is a tale of the diaspora with the revolutionary idealist Michael Bakunin paired with the more tempered yet complex advocate of freedom, Alexander Herzen. Swirling around these men are other revolutionaries along with their friends, family, lovers and the complications that go along with such a diverse group.
Stoppard tries to hold the characters together as they move through a maze of vignettes. The play, like the first in the trilogy show more Voyage, is arranged into scenes that are mostly in chronological order moving from place to place as Herzen and Bakunin move throughout Europe. In doing so characters as diverse as Turgenev, Herwegh, Belinsky, and even Karl Marx appear on the scene. Neither Herzen nor Bakunin can return to Russia and one of the funniest scenes occurs when Hersen is in Nice (Novemebr 1851) and the Russian Consul brings him an order from Czar Nicholas I that he must return to Russia. The Consul's discomfort and attempts to persuade Herzen to accede to the Czar's request are progressively more and more ridiculous and hilarious.
Unlike the dreamlike quality of Voyage, Shipwreck is about the reality of their lives. Instead of finding the utopia they have been dreaming about, they discover that revolutions come with harsh penalties, and not much changes after all. In essence, this play is also about growing up. The characters began in Voyage as young men and women with hopes for the future. Their struggles were those of passionate youths hoping to make a difference. In Shipwreck, they have grown up and are now fighting to put their hopes into action. They learn the hard way that life does not always turn out the way we wish. They must face harsh realities and even death. There is a somewhat manic, frantic pace to many of the scenes in Shipwreck that underscores the characters' desperation as they yearn for political change while striving to hold onto some semblance of normalcy in their personal lives. show less
Stoppard tries to hold the characters together as they move through a maze of vignettes. The play, like the first in the trilogy show more Voyage, is arranged into scenes that are mostly in chronological order moving from place to place as Herzen and Bakunin move throughout Europe. In doing so characters as diverse as Turgenev, Herwegh, Belinsky, and even Karl Marx appear on the scene. Neither Herzen nor Bakunin can return to Russia and one of the funniest scenes occurs when Hersen is in Nice (Novemebr 1851) and the Russian Consul brings him an order from Czar Nicholas I that he must return to Russia. The Consul's discomfort and attempts to persuade Herzen to accede to the Czar's request are progressively more and more ridiculous and hilarious.
Unlike the dreamlike quality of Voyage, Shipwreck is about the reality of their lives. Instead of finding the utopia they have been dreaming about, they discover that revolutions come with harsh penalties, and not much changes after all. In essence, this play is also about growing up. The characters began in Voyage as young men and women with hopes for the future. Their struggles were those of passionate youths hoping to make a difference. In Shipwreck, they have grown up and are now fighting to put their hopes into action. They learn the hard way that life does not always turn out the way we wish. They must face harsh realities and even death. There is a somewhat manic, frantic pace to many of the scenes in Shipwreck that underscores the characters' desperation as they yearn for political change while striving to hold onto some semblance of normalcy in their personal lives. show less
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1960s (1)
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read in 2026 (1)
Modernism (1)
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AP Lit (1)
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scav (1)
1970s (1)
Read in 2014 (1)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 110
- Also by
- 28
- Members
- 22,513
- Popularity
- #943
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 287
- ISBNs
- 376
- Languages
- 13
- Favorited
- 116
