Tom Stoppard, playwright who dazzled with verbal gymnastics, dies aged 88

London: "What's it about?" was a frequent response from bemused theatre-goers to "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", Tom Stoppard's first stage triumph.

Tired of being asked, Stoppard is said to have replied to a woman outside a theatre on Broadway: "It's about to make me very rich."

He later questioned whether he had said "very", Hermione Lee writes in Stoppard's authorised biography, but he had undoubtedly managed to transform his previously precarious finances.

For every puzzled spectator, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant wordplay and sheer daring of a young playwright who had turned Shakespeare inside out and placed the spotlight, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters from the same play.

First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the following year, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" made Stoppard, at the age of 29, the youngest playwright to be staged at the National Theatre in London.

From there, the play went to Broadway and had more than 250 productions worldwide over its first decade.

Stoppard's career flourished for decades more, embracing stage, screen and radio, and demonstrating his thirst to tackle any subject - from mathematics to Dadaist art to landscape gardening.

His final play, "Leopoldstadt", first performed in 2020, follows the story of a Jewish family in Vienna inspired by his own history.

Stoppard's many other successes included "The Real Inspector Hound", which parodied stage whodunnits and sent up theatre critics, "Jumpers", a 1.5 million word epic that delighted and confused its public, and "Night and Day", a satire on the British media.

His densely packed, intricately constructed plays were based on extensive research. "Arcadia", in 1993, considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, blended chaos theory, Isaac Newton and the poet Lord Byron's love life.

The word Stoppardian, first recorded in 1978, meanwhile entered the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the use of verbal gymnastics while addressing philosophical concepts.

The honours he won at home and abroad included an Oscar for co-authoring the screenplay of the 1998 hit film "Shakespeare in Love", and a record five Tony awards for Best Play. In 1997, he was knighted for his contributions to theatre.

He died at home in Dorset, surrounded by his family, his agent United Agents said on Saturday. The cause was not immediately known.

'Incredibly lucky'

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse.

The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.

Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.

In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England.

Boarding school followed at Pocklington in Yorkshire, northern England, where Tom Stoppard loved cricket more than drama and learned how to be British, which Major Stoppard considered the ultimate nationality.

The adult Stoppard, who rediscovered decades later the Jewish roots that he explored in his final play, would accuse his stepfather of "an innate antisemitism".

He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.

"I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life," he wrote in Talk, a U.S. magazine, in 1999, reflecting on returning with his brother to their birthplace Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic.

'Intellect and emotion are bedfellows'

Despite showing academic prowess at school, Stoppard decided not to go to university. Instead, he went straight to work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol, western England.

“I wanted to be a great journalist," Stoppard later said. "My first ambition was to be lying on the floor of an African airport while machine-gun bullets zoomed over my typewriter. But I wasn’t much use as a reporter. I felt I didn’t have the right to ask people questions.

"I always thought they’d throw the teapot at me or call the police."

While he found reporting daunting, he threw himself into working as a theatre and cinema critic, and his love of drama took hold.

He began making the influential friendships with actors and other writers that would shape his career. He made up his mind to move to London and start writing plays.

Success only ensued after dogged persistence and sleepless nights spent chain-smoking and wrestling with writer's block.

One of Britain's most established critics, Michael Billington, who reported on every Stoppard first night for half a century, sought to pin down the playwright's status in a piece in Britain's Guardian newspaper in 2015.

Stoppard, Billington found, was "a writer capable of inciting admiration, awe and astonishment as well as a baffled bewilderment, sometimes all in the same evening".

Addressing the frequent criticism that Stoppard could be overly cerebral, Billington wrote that, at his finest, he demonstrated that "intellect and emotion are bedfellows rather than opposites". He showed the world that a scientific or philosophical concept could be dramatic subject matter.

Hopes of Posterity

The self-deprecating dramatist rejected classification and resisted requests to explain himself.

“Whenever I talk to intelligent students about my work, I feel nervous, as if I were going through customs," he told the New Yorker magazine in 1977.

"‘Let’s have a look in your suitcase, if you don’t mind, sir," Stoppard continued. "And, sure enough, under the first layer of shirts there’s a pound of hash and fifty watches and all kinds of exotic contraband. ‘How do you explain this, sir?’ ‘I’m sorry, Officer, I admit it’s there, but I honestly can’t remember packing it.’"

For all Stoppard's dismissal of academic interpretation, he had hopes his name would live on.

"Quite frankly, it has always meant a lot to me, the idea that one is writing for the future as well," he said on receiving a lifetime achievement award in 2017. "I’m never convinced it will work out that way."

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'Theatre is recreation'

For Stoppard, theatre, first of all, was for fun.

"Theatre is recreation, it must entertain. But does the audience have to understand everything they see? If you or I go into an art gallery, we don’t understand what the artist is trying to tell us, though we may enjoy the painting," he said in a 1995 interview.

Stoppard's ventures into film led to his taking the top award at the Venice Film festival in 1990 for his screen adaptation of "Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead".

He wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun" and earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Terry Gilliam's cult 1985 hit "Brazil" before winning with "Shakespeare in Love".

Stoppard had four sons, two from each of his first two marriages. He married his third wife television producer Sabrina Guinness in 2014.

His son Ed Stoppard is an actor, who performed in "Leopoldstadt".

Critics hailed Stoppard for confronting his own family history in the play. It marked the end of a theatrical journey that was willing to take on almost any subject matter.

In his thirties, he said: "I would like ultimately, before being carried out feet first, to have done a bit of absolutely everything."