NOVEMBER 2025 – Anyone who has ever sat through a Tom Stoppard play – all witty and original but dense and abstruse, full of flourishes but often ponderous – can be excused if they felt they were never quite, well, entertained. Stoppard’s works are regarded as memorable, though, a pillar today of Western, late 20th Century literature and drama. But it took his death – at age 88 last week – for a knowledgeable writer like Bruce Weber to cogently explain why Stoppard’s life and work were so impressive and important. Especially to today’s younger generation, who’ve had little exposure to him.
Turns out, Stoppard captured the attention of that ever-shrinking global tribe known as intellectuals – people who just liked hearing Stoppard’s ideas, and how his characters articulated them.
It’s also notable that the NYT’s obituary of Stoppard was drafted more than a decade ago – and stashed into the obit drawer until the appropriate time of publication. After all, Weber, a culture and theatre critic as well as an obituary writer, retired from the paper in 2015. Weber writes:
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/theater/tom-stoppard-dead.html
In a lengthy 1977 profile in The New Yorker, the English critic Kenneth Tynan confronted Mr. Stoppard with the charge that his work lacked genuine feeling. His response was a model of both self-scrutiny and prescience.
“That criticism is always being presented to me as if it were a membrane that I must somehow break through in order to grow up,” he said. “Well, I don’t see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I’m carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off, like fruit. I don’t like it very much even when it works. I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate fantasies I construct. It’s based on the fallacy of naturalism. There’s a direct line of descent from the naturalistic theater which leads you straight down to the dregs of bad theater, bad thinking and bad feeling. At the other end of the scale, I dislike Abstract Expressionism even more than I dislike naturalism. But you asked me about expressing emotion. Let me put the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I’m waiting until I can do it well.”