‘Wanting to know makes us matter’: Playwright Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) made us all philosophers

Tom Stoppard, who has died at 88, was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful playwrights of our age. He won his first Tony Award for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968, and his last for Leopoldstadt in 2023.

His life was extraordinary. Born Tomáš Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his Jewish family fled Nazi occupation to India and then England. He chose to become a journalist rather than go to university, and became close friends with Nobel Prize winners, presidents, and Mick Jagger.

The wit and intellectual curiosity of Stoppard’s plays was so distinctive that “Stoppardian” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. Hermione Lee’s biography of him contains a cartoon with annoyed audience members hissing: “Look at the Jones’s pretending to get all the jokes in a Stoppard play.”

Stoppard just assumed his audience was as well read and inquisitive as he was.

Philosophy is the foundation

As Stoppard said to American theatre critic Mel Gussow in 1974,

“Most of the propositions I’m interested in have been kidnapped and dressed up by academic philosophy, but they are in fact the kind of proposition that would occur to any intelligent person in his bath.”

Philosophy is the foundation of Stoppard’s plays. They cite Aquinas, Aristotle, Ayer, Bentham, Kant, Moore, Plato, Ramsey, Russell, Ryle and Zeno. One...

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