Remembering Tom Stoppard, a Playwright of Thrilling Intellect

The writer, who has died at age 88, brought dazzling rhetorical style and deep feeling to his ambitious, erudite plays

Tom Stoppard, whose death at age 88 was announced on Saturday, may or may not have been the greatest playwright of the past half century or so, but he was undoubtedly the most intellectually daring, historically inquisitive and encyclopedically knowledgeable. If you throw in the rhetorical brilliance, the heart and the boundless wit that coursed through his greatest works, his pre-eminence is hard to challenge. Across his career he collected five Tony Awards for best play (a record) and an Oscar for the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love”—probably the work that brought him the largest audience.

British dramatist Tom Stoppard circa 2013.

The theater’s importance as a locus of intelligent inquiry and intellectual ferment—not momentous, alas—owes a great debt to his influence. Mr. Stoppard insisted, through his works, that theater could and should engage with ideas, with philosophy, with the vast knowledge amassed by writers and thinkers of many ages. And he brought his multifarious interests to sometimes bewildered but almost always fascinated audiences with an assiduousness that remains incomparable—and amusing. Theatergoers of today rarely if ever encounter the workings of a mind so capacious in its interests and abilities as his.

Born in Czechoslovakia to Jewish parents who had to leave the country during the rise of the Nazis—a subject he would only approach in “Leopoldstadt,” his last and among his greatest plays—Mr. Stoppard ultimately arrived in England, where he established himself as an audacious new talent with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1966. The play was an astonishment in how it transformed its petty theft of a single, little-regarded line of dialogue from “Hamlet” into a formidably funny riff on the absurdity and smallness of life, the grim inevitability of death and, not incidentally, the strange magic by which theater can make sense—or expose the senselessness—of existence.

He would go on to compose—the word seems apt for the manner in which he could weave themes and motifs into his plays with the brilliance of a great creator of musical works—a corpus of dramas and comedies that married thought and feeling with dazzling dexterity. “Jumpers,” from 1972, was in its way exemplary of Mr. Stoppard’s high-wire daring: a play that explored the dead ends of philosophy and the limits of human knowledge through the comic story of a befuddled academic juxtaposed with the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Also, there were onstage gymnastics. “Travesties,” from 1974, was arguably Mr. Stoppard’s most bookwormy play—at least at that early point in his career. It pounced upon the coincidence that James Joyce, the Dada poet and essayist Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin were all living in Zurich in 1917. But Mr. Stoppard did not write an informational tract about their activities but a frolicsome comedy about how great men, of good or ill will, can be viewed with an amused eye by their supposed lesser beings. The play’s perspective is that of a minor British consular official.

I have to admit that some of Mr. Stoppard’s plays, which occasionally seemed to come with invisible footnotes that you couldn’t read even if you squinted, struck me more as fireworks displays of erudition than theatrically vital dramas. Among the most formidable of these was the trilogy “The Coast of Utopia,” which explored, across an ultimately exhausting nine hours, the literary and political history of 19th-century Russia as the roots of revolution began to sprout. The headline on my assessment (I didn’t write the headline, but it got the gist): “‘Utopia’ Is a Bore. There, I Said It.” I would say it again: I have read more scintillating Wikipedia articles. Or at least shorter ones.

Mr. Stoppard was always at his best when he let his heart dictate the architecture of his plays, even when they still grappled with richly examined ideas about the thorny realities of life or the intricacies of history, and even arcane areas of science such as quantum physics. Among the masterpieces that will be revived as long as there are stages is certainly “The Real Thing,” his 1982 drama about the marital vicissitudes of a playwright (not coincidental, one assumes) who abandons one actress wife when he falls for another one, only to find that his richly eloquent ideas about love may be nothing more than a house of cards—not coincidentally the title of the play within the play. Perhaps Mr. Stoppard’s most plainly personal work—although you could examine its many sleeves of thought and find nary a heart exposed—it is one of the most complex and persuasive contemporary plays about the truths and illusions inherent in loving.

Also among Mr. Stoppard’s most indelible achievements was “The Invention of Love,” his elegiac and beautifully compassionate play about the poet A.E. Housman. Here Mr. Stoppard managed to impart a few slivers of his deep knowledge of literary history while exploring the universal theme of a love that cannot find expression or recompense. And certainly “Arcadia,” Mr. Stoppard’s time-traveling story that embraces the history of English gardens, advanced mathematics, Lord Byron and the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, ranks high among the great plays of the past several decades. In this masterwork, as in “The Invention of Love” and “The Real Thing,” Mr. Stoppard’s literary brilliance shone mightily, but the restrained yet fathoms-deep feeling that animated his finest writing took precedence.

There are not many playwrights, or artists in general, who manage to sustain the high quality of their work virtually from the beginning of their career until its conclusion. Mr. Stoppard did so. “Leopoldstadt,” his last produced play, was unquestionably another masterpiece—of a beauty that recalls the late creations of Verdi or Mozart or Henry James. An expansive depiction of a family of well-to-do Viennese Jews, beginning at the turn of the 20th century and concluding in 1955, when its few surviving members gather, the play is a studied, mournful but unsparingly unsentimental drama that illuminated in sharp detail the complex history of the family set against the churning tides of history. As in his greatest works, here Mr. Stoppard found the beating, bleeding heart in world-altering events that can elude historians, even as he honored the necessity of revisiting with a clear eye the brutal truths of the past. It was, and is, a formidably moving capstone to a career that will now itself become a matter for theater historians to debate—Mr. Stoppard, whose plays were packed with verbal swordplay, would surely relish the idea—and, more importantly, to celebrate.

Mr. Isherwood is the Journal’s theater critic.