Recently (November 29, this year 2025), in his home in Dorset, Tom Stoppard (85 years old), a great of the world, died literature, who, with his rich, above all dramatic oeuvre, established himself not only as one of the most performed theater authors of our era, but also as an indisputable intellectual icon of British culture of the second half of the past and the beginning of the 21st century. At one time, in 2008 Daily Telegraph ranked him 11th in the ranking of the most influential figures in the history of British culture. He was even compared to William Shakespeare, because similar to the works of English and world classics of dramatic literature, Stoppard's theatrical works enjoy wide popularity and have been performed on all the world's most important stages from "West End" to "Broadway". A tireless worker, in addition to the theater he wrote for radio, television, film, translated from Russian, Polish, Czech and German (Chekhov, Mrožek, Havel, Nestroy, Schnitzler, etc.), and for film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, filmed in Yugoslavia (with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman in the title roles), which he directed himself based on his own script, won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1990. An engaged intellectual, a provocative writer and a curious man thirsty for new knowledge, he succeeded in what other authors could only dream of. Namely, obsessed with history and issues of identity, critically articulating the most complex philosophical problems in a virtuoso manner, with an obligatory dose of typically English humor (in which irony, sarcasm and mild cynicism are indispensable), he managed to present his ideas to a wide audience in an entertaining and comprehensible way, without losing the least bit of seriousness and relevance.
"HOW I BECAME JEWISH"
His works did not only result in high artistic achievements, but they were also commercial successes, which on the one hand made Stoppard a materially secure, even rich person, and on the other an independent man, a free intellectual who could engage socially without any obligations to anyone, participate politically and fight for the ideals he believed in: human rights, freedom and dignity of every person, especially in "captured" totalitarian societies. But, unlike many others, he didn't just keep to his words, but in the seventies and eighties (through Amnesty International) he became actively involved directly, providing material and all kinds of help to Central Eastern European dissidents. And after he visited the USSR (and met with the dissidents Viktor Feinberg and Vladimir Bukovsky) and Czechoslovakia (made a sincere friendship with Vaclav Havel), he particularly advocated for the help of the dissidents in Ukraine, and mostly those in Czechoslovakia, since he himself, like Tomáš Sträussler, was born in that country (July 3, 1937 in Zlin), where his father Eugen worked as a doctor in a famous factory shoes "Bata", and mother Martha Beck (both Jews) as a nurse. It is interesting to note that for a long time Stoppard did not know that he was Jewish. The mother practically hid that part of the family history from her sons (Tom had an older brother Peter) until her death (1996), not wanting to "burden" her children with a painful and tragic legacy, because the parents and extended relatives on both the father's and mother's sides were killed in the Nazi death camps, in Terezin and Auschwitz. Not long after (1999) Stoppard published his famous essay "How I Became a Jew", in which he described the shock he experienced when he learned about his origins and his decision to investigate them thoroughly (and literary).
Realizing that the Nazis would occupy and dismember Czechoslovakia and that they would end up in a concentration camp like the Jews, Eugen left Zlin with his family in April 1939 and, with the help of his employer, moved to Singapore, where the "Bata" factory had its subsidiary. But still he did not manage to escape from the war. Namely, when the Japanese attacked Singapore, the families of British soldiers and employees were evacuated to India (Bombay) in 1942, including Martha and her children. Soon after, after being wounded during the fighting, on the eve of the fall of Singapore, Eugen was transferred with the other wounded to a transport ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese while sailing towards Indonesia. Stoppard's father did not survive. Martha moved with her children to Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, where she started running one of "Bata's" shops and there she met the British officer Kenneth Stoppard, whom she married in Calcutta in 1945. At the end of the war, the family returned to England, settled on the family estate in Nottingham, and Kenneth adopted the children (Tom received British citizenship in 1960), gave them his surname and continued to educate them. Tom attended prestigious and expensive colleges (Dolphin and later Pocklington School), but after finishing high school he didn't want to study, but in 1954 he got a job as a journalist in Bristol and started following culture and writing theater reviews (then he met the famous Peter O'Toole, who later helped him a lot in his work), and then he himself, after moving to London (1960), where he worked for "Scene" magazine, devoted himself to writing theatrical works.
THEATER
At that time, his first work was created Walking on water, which was adapted for television in 1963, and five years later it was staged on theater boards, but now under the name Let a free man enter.. Meanwhile, Stoppard's "existentialist comedy", titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, in which the focus is on two secondary characters from Shakespeare Hamlet (first produced in 1966), was a huge success with both critics and audiences at the Edinburgh Theater Festival. In the first ten years, the drama was performed on more than 250 stages around the world. After that, almost every work by Stoppard, in which he proved himself as a (great) master of dialogue, was accompanied by triumphant ovations, and he, crowned with world fame, was unanimously accepted as one of the greatest playwrights of our time. He went down in history as the "youngest playwright" whose work was performed at the prestigious National Theater in London. Soon, the widely accepted term "Stoppard" came into circulation in theater (as well as Oxford) dictionaries, which is used to denote a masterful (black) humorous language game in the explanation and/or research of complex ontological and other philosophical concepts, as well as scientific ideas and theories. From a series of his truly brilliant pieces, in which everything bursts with perfectly thought-out sentences, provocative dialogues, metalinguistic puns (they call him a magician of language), playful satire, and all the tragedies of our lives are fascinatingly "packaged" in a seemingly fluffy entertaining context, it is difficult to single out the best, because all his works are simply perfect, "the best". And yes, all of them, or almost all of them, are a kind of history book of the 20th century, but I would still like to look back at the ones that left the deepest impression on me, whether I watched them or read them. Namely, Stoppard enjoys a cult status in the Czech Republic, most of his works have been translated and are regularly played in theaters there, and since I lived in Prague for quite a long time, I had the opportunity to take advantage of that privilege. Of course, he also played in our country. The Zagreb production (at the &TD Theater, from 1971) remains unforgettable to me. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, directed by Joško Juvančič, in which Rade Šerbedžija and Ivica Vidović simply excelled, unsurpassed in improvisations, so it used to happen that they simply replaced the characters in some performances. But for reasons unknown to me, over time the interest in his pieces waned, almost disappeared.
Drama Jumpers (1972), "a combination of intellectual boldness and deep sensitivity", written in the form of a thriller, tells about a murder and a professor of philosophy who tries to figure out whether morality is conditioned by history or is it an absolute, God's law? In a piece Travesty (1974) dealt with some kind of SF constructions, starting from the fact that during the First World War, Lenin, Tristan Tzara and James Joyce were in Zürich at the same time. The work The real deal (1982) with elements of autobiography, is dedicated to researching the (impossibility) of complete honesty in male-female relationships and points to the painful consequences of adultery. Drama occupies a special place in his oeuvre Arcadia (1993) in which he dealt with chaos theory, historiography and landscape architecture, where various characters appear, for example Isaac Newton and Lord Byron, and everything takes place in a typically English, rural aristocratic environment in which the main protagonists clash with each other in discussions about the disintegration and collapse of society and its values. In a monumental dramatic trilogy The coast of utopia ("Voyage", "Shipwreck" and "Rescue", from 2002) which lasts a total of nine hours (first performed at the London National Theatre), Stoppard "immersed himself in the abyss and darkness of our history" in order to "map" the fate of the leading figures of the Russian emigration in the mid-19th century. Four years later, a drama was performed (at the "Royal Court"). Rock´n´Roll, which takes place in Czechoslovakia and in which he thinks about how his life would have turned out if he had returned to his native country with his mother after the end of the Second World War. He wonders: would he follow the path of his friend Havel?
MOVIES, SLAVA, WOMEN
During his career as a writer, Stoppard wrote almost 50 theater plays, and each one is big and significant in its own way. For example, the very idea that in a one-act play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern focus on two secondary characters from Hamlet, while the action of Shakespeare's tragedy is (re)placed in the background, was revolutionary in itself, and so is his last great, I can say without any exaggeration, genius drama Leopoldstadt (2020) which I was lucky enough to see in Brno. Namely, the key sentence from that one-act play reads: "There was a moment somewhere at the beginning, when we could have said no, but somehow we missed it", after which it was too late for everything. Leopoldstadt, that is, the author's confrontation with the Holocaust through the tragic fate of the rich Jewish family Merz, in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. In that procedural context of the anti-Semitism of Austria-Hungary and its disintegration, Hitler's Anschluss, the horrors of war and the Nazi genocide against the Jews, the fate of the main characters of this condensed, dark story, but in which life still wins in the end, unravels. Leopoldstadt is a melancholic, in many respects autobiographical story with which he seemed to put an end to his striking work. And yes, when talking about Stoppard's plays, one important thing is often forgotten: although he only wrote one novel, Lord Malaquist and Mr. Moon (1966), as Hermione Lee claims, it contained most of the themes and ideas that I later developed and processed in my extensive dramatic repertoire.
photo: ap photo...
In addition to the theater, Stoppard was also intensively involved in adaptations and writing original screenplays for films. In 1998, the film Shakespeare in Love won seven "Oscars", including for the script co-authored by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. So, in his impressive career, in addition to the "Oscar" and "Golden Lion", Stoppard won five more "Tony" awards and three "Laurence Olivier" awards, which so far no one has managed. On the film, he collaborated with the most prominent screenwriters and directors: Steven Spielberg (Empire of the sun), George Lucas (Star Wars), Reiner W. Fassbinder, etc. And back in 1985, the script for a cult, dystopian film Brazil, co-written with Stoppard by Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, was nominated for an Oscar, but the award eluded them.
Witty and charming, in many respects a true gentleman, Stoppard enjoyed great affection among women. He was married three times, in the first two marriages he had four sons, but he was not indifferent to women's charms either, he had numerous mistresses, and his long-term stormy romances with actresses Felicity Kendall and later Sinead Cusack, who eventually returned to her husband, actor Jeremy Irons, are known to the public. Stoppard was a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize on several occasions, but it seems that for the political "taste" of Swedish academics he leaned too liberally to the left, while this did not bother the British Queen (Elizabeth II), who knighted him in 1997, and in 2000 he received the prestigious "Order of Merit". Personally, of the numerous respectable recognitions he received, he was most proud of the fact that, under the auspices of the Charter 77 Foundation, a prestigious prize named after him ("Tom Stoppard Prize") was established in Stockholm in 1983, which was awarded for "exceptional" essay work to Czech authors in exile, or those who were forbidden to publicly act in their homeland, so they had to publish in samizdat, within the so-called underground dissident movement. culture. And what to say in the end, to repeat: Stoppard's impressive work is a powerful and great literary ode to freedom, but also an ode to the possibilities of its (lost) battle.
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