Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), known for plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), screenplays as diverse as Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and television adaptations like Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (2012), was a talented and clever writer for stage, screen and radio.

Described by fellow playwright David Hare as “spendthrift with jokes,” he could be highly entertaining, using humour to show off undoubted intelligence. The critic Kenneth Tynan said Stoppard’s understatement amounted to “see how self-deprecating I can be and still be assertive… Tom’s modesty is a form of egotism.”

Stoppard was also, in his own words, a “timid libertarian,” who defended bourgeois liberalism with a superficial but explicit anti-communism. His identification of Marxism and communism with the repression of its Stalinist distortions hampered his work. He exemplified the intellectual crisis of the later 20th century.

Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, the son of a Jewish doctor, he only discovered in middle age that all four of his grandparents had died in the Holocaust. His paternal grandparents died in the Riga ghetto, his maternal grandparents in Auschwitz. This informed his unsatisfactory Leopoldstadt (2020), which “deals with the fate of European Jewry by tracing the destiny of an interlinked Viennese family over the first half of the 20th century.” The play takes its name from the old Jewish quarter of Vienna.

The family fled to Singapore in 1939, with help from his father’s colleagues at the Bata shoe company, they escaped again from Japanese invasion in 1942, during which his father was killed. Tomás, his brother Petr and mother set off for Australia. Diverted by war at sea, they went to India, where his mother worked for Bata.

At the end of the war, she married British officer Kenneth Stoppard, and they moved to Britain in 1946. The boys anglicised as Tom and Peter, went to school in Nottinghamshire and then Pocklington, a private day and boarding school in East Yorkshire. He hated Pocklington.

In 1988 he said “The whole Czech thing about me has got wildly out of hand… I was brought up English. I don’t feel Czech.” But that antipathy toward his Czech history hinted at a political outlook he cultivated his whole life.

Stoppard’s Englishness was based around identification with a bourgeois liberalism he treated as essential and eternal: “The strong argument is to behave decently before you do the arithmetic because the arithmetic is never going to be that bad. There’s a lot of space, money and goodwill in England.”

He put forward similar sentiments in his Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002), whose aim was “nothing less than to depict the rise and early struggles of the Russian intelligentsia” in the years 1833 to 1868.

Stoppard put these conceptions in pioneering Russian radical Alexander Herzen’s mouth:

“Their [the British establishment’s] coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don’t give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”

This elevation of liberalism above history does an injustice to Herzen. Stoppard’s identification with Herzen’s disillusionment is a defence of liberalism against the revolutionaries who drew quite other lessons from Herzen’s life, Marx and Lenin above all.

The conservatism was Stoppard’s own position, making him unable to transcend political contradictions even when he was aware of them. Having said that he wrote only for posterity, he later said he was “mostly, unconsciously, trying not to cooperate with posterity.” To his credit, Stoppard last year defended Jonathan Glazer when he spoke out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In 2016, he visited the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, France. A journalist asked if it was possible Britain’s goodwill was being exploited by asylum seekers, Stoppard replied that it might be, but in that case he would be happy to be historically on the wrong side. Rather than a defence of migrants against a rapidly rightward-moving politics, this was nostalgia for an official political culture long extinct.

Returning to Stoppard’s life story, he moved to Bristol with his family and began working as a local journalist in 1954, at 17, forgoing a college education. He began developing his writing, submitting plays to BBC Radio.

Work as a reviewer and features writer for the Bristol Evening World took him to the theatre, although he was uncomfortable as a critic. In the Bristol Old Vic’s 1957-58 season he saw Peter O’Toole play Hamlet and Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

Hooked on theatre, Stoppard found initial success with radio and television plays and short stories. Radio drama was undergoing a period of inventive experimentation. An imaginative medium that does not require literalism, it allowed Stoppard’s clever wit space for invention.

Translating this to the stage inclined his earlier works to a sometimes-dazzling excess of cleverness. Although not shallow, the plays were not as deep as their learning and wit suggested.

His breakthrough came with Rosencrantz, which brings two hapless, ultimately overwhelmed and doomed courtiers from Shakespeare’s Hamlet centre stage. The absurdist piece, with comic and tragic elements, expands on the activities of these minor characters, taking place in the interstices, as it were, of Shakespeare’s work.

Stoppard admitted his big influences were T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“No! I am not Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord…”) and the bleak absurdism of Samuel Beckett, with its existentialist background.

They are revealing influences, disillusioned and world-weary, with Eliot championing a mystical high church traditionalism. Stoppard had a good sense of the theatre’s potential for physical surprise—the arguments in Jumpers (1972), a satirical treatment of academic philosophy likening it to a gymnastics competition, are conducted by a philosophy don and a troupe of acrobats—making his plays theatrically exciting but hobbled intellectually.

For all the theatricality, the absurdism of Rosencrantz comes across as a rather cute and complacent playing with the literary canon. This was a regular theme, with Stoppard’s toying with the canon seeming affectionate and protective. He wrote and directed a 1990 screen adaptation of Rosencrantz with Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. The same slightly precious approach runs through Shakespeare in Love, which portrays a fictional love affair during the famed playwright’s writing of Romeo and Juliet, where every actor describes Shakespeare’s new script as being about his or her character.

Rosencrantz went through various versions before the Oxford Theatre Group had a hit with it at the Edinburgh Festival. Tynan requested a script for Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Stoppard had arrived.

Although his later plays would move away from the often-dazzling absurdism and theatricality, Jumpers and Travesties (1974) outlined the conservatism of political and philosophical thought that marked his work.

The former’s moral philosopher George is writing a lecture on the existence of god against a backdrop of marital crisis and a team of acrobatic professors of philosophy. Audiences may have felt some recognition at George’s discussion of his method:

My method of inquiry this evening into certain aspects of this hardy perennial may strike some of you as overly engaging, but experience has taught me that to attempt to sustain the attention of rival schools of academics by argument alone is tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket.

Travesties explores the presence in Zurich in 1917 of Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara prior to the Russian Revolution. Their arguments are woven through the recollections by minor diplomat Henry Carr (also based on a real figure) of an amateur production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Tzara is a plate-smashing iconoclast, with Joyce the Stoppard-like advocate:

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality… If there is any meaning in it, it is what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities…

Stoppard gives them playful interactions but presents Lenin humourlessly in material drawn from his writings. The intention was to portray Lenin as the originator of the Stalinist distortion of Marxism that followed.

Stoppard was explicit in a long 1974 interview. “People tend to think of Stalinism as being … a perversion of Leninism,” he said, with the Trotskyist movement obviously in view. “That is an absurd and foolish untruth, and it is one on which the Left bases itself. Lenin perverted Marxism, and Stalin carried on from there.”

This was the Bad Man theory of history and politics writ large: “Ideological differences are often temperamental differences in ideological disguise.” For all that he accused Lenin of perverting Marxism, Marx and materialism were also Stoppard’s target. “The great irony about Marx was that his impulses were deeply moral while his intellect insisted on a materialist view of the world.”

Stoppard claimed Marx’s “theory of capital, his theory of value, and his theory of revolution, have all been refuted … In short he got it wrong.” Stoppard, the traditionalist liberal, praised Eduard Bernstein for saying “Marx had got it wrong, but that it didn’t matter because social justice was going to come through other means … human solidarity was a better bet than class solidarity.”

Whatever the nuances of thought, this view remained, which is why his nine-hour Coast of Utopia trilogy failed in its efforts to step up intellectually.

Tynan wrote a supportive profile after Travesties, comparing Stoppard to Czech liberal anti-communist playwright Václav Havel. Stoppard’s vocal defence of free speech became very much identified with the promotion of anti-communist dissidents under Stalinism, although it was hardly new in his thinking.

From the late 1970s, a period of reaction internationally to the 1968-75 upsurge of class struggle, his work became more directly political in this way, while still theatrically inventive. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) featured a Soviet dissident in a psychiatric hospital. An inmate images an orchestra in his head—the play requires a full orchestra, which André Previn conducted for the debut—and the script plays repeatedly with mathematics.

The more explicit he became about these politics, the more the weaknesses emerged. In Rock’n’Roll (2006), he looked at the 1968 Prague Spring and 1989 Velvet Revolution through the eyes of a Czech student Jan and Cambridge academic Max, a Communist Party member. It is informed largely by his agreement with Havel and is the weaker for it.

Jan’s dissidence is driven not by political conviction but by passively becoming a victim of the regime—“Everything’s dissident except shutting up and eating shit”—and leads to advocacy of rock’n’roll as dissidence, citing Czech group the Plastic People of the Universe. Max resigns from the CP but remains loyal to its political confusions, contemplating voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1987 in an attempt to wake the British working class up.

This is poor stuff, and points to the limitations and constraints underlying Stoppard’s evident talent. There is much to enjoy in Stoppard’s work, but it is never as substantial as it first appears.