Sir Tom Stoppard, one of Britain's most celebrated playwrights, has enjoyed an extraordinary sixty-year career spanning theatre, film, television and radio. To honour his prolific output and lifelong passion for cricket, we've selected a first XI of his most significant works that showcase his unique blend of intellectual depth and comedic brilliance.
The Stage Triumphs
Arcadia (1993) stands as one of Stoppard's most complex theatrical achievements. This haunting mid-career masterpiece moves between an English country house in the early nineteenth century and the late twentieth century, creating delicate echoes and contradictions that explore literature, architecture, mathematics, physics and the elusive nature of historical truth. The play contains one of the dramatist's finest jokes about a hermit with an unexpected curiosity about current events.
The Real Thing (1982) marked Stoppard's first major play set in contemporary England. This dazzlingly self-reflective West End comedy features a playwright named Henry who has written a West End comedy starring his first wife. Through clever repetitions of lines, scenes and props with increasingly darker meanings, the play explores where truth lies in love, politics and art. Stoppard revealingly uses the metaphor of a cricket bat to express his position, and the work continues to receive regular revivals, including at the Old Vic in autumn 2024.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) launched Stoppard's reputation by using Shakespeare's Hamlet as a creative springboard. The play centres on two minor characters from the original work who find themselves thrust into leading roles. Beginning with a memorable coin-tossing scene that warps probability laws, it showcases Stoppard's comedic skills while delivering a profound meditation on chance and mortality. This remains Stoppard's most frequently revived theatre work and his only play adapted into a film, which he directed himself in 1990.
Screen and Radio Gems
Brazil (1985) represents Stoppard's brilliant foray into cinematic satire. Collaborating with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, Stoppard helped create this dystopian sci-fi film set in a nightmarish bureaucratic society. Despite the shared authorship, the film maintains a distinct Stoppardian tone that perfectly blends Kafkaesque and Pythonesque influences, uniting his native and adopted cultural sensibilities.
Shakespeare in Love (1998) earned Stoppard an Oscar (shared with Marc Norman) and extends the Shakespearean scholarship he began with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Focusing on the Bard himself, the film serves as Stoppard's most autobiographical work before his later memoir plays, dramatising the practical realities of a dramatic career across four centuries.
The Dog It Was That Died (1982) highlights Stoppard's commitment to radio drama, exemplified by his legendary response to Steven Spielberg about turning down a film project for a BBC radio commission. This sound play about a secret agent who can't remember which side he's working for features remarkable site-specific sound effects and the manic punning that characterises much of Stoppard's work.
Late Career Masterworks
Rock'n'Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020) function as alternative biographies exploring different paths Stoppard's life might have taken. Rock'n'Roll moves between Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1989, imagining whether the playwright would have been a dissident or collaborator if his family hadn't fled Czechoslovakia. Leopoldstadt, inspired by Stoppard's late-life discovery of his fully Jewish heritage, grapples with having escaped the Holocaust that claimed all four of his grandparents.
Parade's End (2012) marked Stoppard's return to television after a three-decade absence. Adapting Ford Madox Ford's novel sequence about a love triangle playing out before and during the First World War allowed Stoppard to explore his favourite theme of lives pressured by history. The production benefited from Stoppard's full attention during a nine-year theatrical drought and features Benedict Cumberbatch's memorable performance as the wounded aristocrat Christopher Tietjens.
The Coast of Utopia (2002) presents a vast trilogy about Russian intellectuals in European exile during mid-nineteenth century revolutions. Though initially overlong in its National Theatre premiere, Stoppard's rewritten, tauter version for Broadway in 2006 won him one of his five Tony Awards for Best Play and deserves its UK premiere.
Throughout his remarkable career, Tom Stoppard has consistently demonstrated that intellectual rigour and entertainment need not be mutually exclusive. From his reputation-making Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to his deeply personal Leopoldstadt, Stoppard's works continue to challenge, delight and move audiences across multiple mediums.
