“We were swimming in Tom Stoppard’s mind pool!” – The actors pay tribute to the great playwright Tom Stoppard

Rufus Sewell: “I felt he lent you his wonderful intelligence.”

I worked with Tom when I was very young, in Arcadia in 1993, and again in Rock’n’Roll 13 years later. Meanwhile, I slowly realized that not all jobs are like this. He was one of the smartest people you could ever meet, but the extraordinary thing was that you would walk away from conversations with him feeling like you weren’t stupid or stupid. This is not always the case with great writers and funny people. Generosity of spirit characterized the time I spent with him. He was incredibly good company, very kind, and you felt encouraged to put forward your own ideas, and tell your own jokes.

This feeling that he lent you his wonderful intelligence was the same in his work. You’ll see a play conveying all these competing ideas, and you’ll leave buzzing and very confident that you can explain it to your friends, but you have to make sure you’ve worked out exactly how to do it before you get to Hammersmith, because that’s when it starts to evaporate. The benefit of his genius will probably be felt as far as Barons Court.

I was doing another play when I had a rather scary audition for Arcadia. The night before the test, there was a knock on my dressing room. I didn’t get dressed and said who is he? “I’m Tom Stoppard,” a very special voice answered. I grabbed a towel to put over myself and opened the door. He said it was his second time seeing the play, that it was a good production and that he knew I was coming tomorrow and wanted me to know “I’m on your side.” The process was still long and arduous – it wasn’t like I was given the role right away – but it gave me the confidence to have that number in the corner and get his approval.

When we were filming Arcadia, he was there decked out in scarves and cigarette smoke, and in my peripheral vision I was trying to detect any shift that signified approval or disapproval — a leg crossed or uncrossed, a scarf rearranged, a puff of smoke. There was an ambiguity in his writing that really countered this kind of heavy, intellectual quality. He knew the difference in language between a “cock” and a “prick.” I was aware during rehearsals that he changed a line because he felt like it was too writerly, and that he needed something to take the edge off. So, despite the brilliance for which he was known, if something felt restricted on the page, he would bristle at it.

Christine Baranski: “How can I reach this level of amazing intelligence?”

You don’t have to wait until you’re eulogizing someone to tell them how much they mean to you. So I’m happy to say that a few years ago, I had Tom and some of the actors from The Real Thing, which we did in New York in 1984, in my apartment. We toasted him and told him it remained the most special theatrical experience of our careers.

We were all a little worried about Tom smoking, but I knew he wanted to smoke. I had an ashtray I saved from Brasserie Lipp in Paris years ago when I was there with my 16-year-old daughter, and at the table next to us were Tom and Mick Jagger. I gave it to Tom, opened the big window, and he had a couple of American spirits. The ashtray with its butt is still on my bookshelf.

The Real Thing was a huge hit on Broadway—we won a Tony Award—but I would come home at night and think: I’m not smart enough to be in this play. I’ll have to fake it. For one thing, I was an American actor who was terribly English, but the challenge, as with Stephen Sondheim, was how could I reach this level of dazzling intelligence? The whole experience was uplifting. We were swimming in Tom Stoppard’s mind pool, which is a very special place. As you do with Shakespeare, you feel like you’re on a higher level.

Anyone will talk enthusiastically about it. I remember him coming to rehearsals wearing these soft suede jackets, with that shaggy hair and those sexy lips. We were all Tom’s fans. He was very elegant, the closest thing to a Wildean character we will ever get. Later, when I was filming Mamma Mia! For several weeks in England, we had been trying to meet up but were too busy. On my last day in London he took me to tea and said: “I’m ashamed of myself. I’ve been a guest in my country all this time and I haven’t taken care of you.” That’s a noble thing to say.

He can be extraordinarily intelligent. What amazed me most was that he could channel his keen intelligence to cruel effect, but I never saw any kind of evil spirit in him. He enjoyed being Tom Stoppard, and it was an invention. He came to England as Tomáš Sträussler and loved his English upbringing.

One of the first plays I ever did was The Real Inspector Hound in Baltimore. That was fun. I especially loved doing Stoppard because of his great command of language. You can only send a sentence with a certain degree of spin and it will please the audience.

Susan Wokoma: ‘He was always away from a WhatsApp message’

You can’t be involved in a major Tom Stoppard production without Tom Stoppard’s approval, so the fact that I got to be involved in The Real Thing in Tom’s life is something I will cherish forever. We were told he was seriously ill when we started rehearsals – and yet, he always got a WhatsApp message with answers to our many questions that arose from such a massive and terrifyingly endearing text. We could hear and feel Tom’s longing – it was the first time such a production had been staged without him in the rehearsal room. As a company, we wanted nothing more than to make Tom proud.

Then, on the Saturday before press night, our company’s stage manager, Rebecca, told us that despite his travel warning, Tom had come to see the show. I’ve known the brave James McArdle – the brilliant Henry – since we were 18 and 19 and I’ve never seen him so terrified.

We were asked to return to the hall to meet Tom once the audience had left. There we had an “intimate audience with…” that I will remember for the rest of my life. Most importantly, he loved the production, the first major revival for which he was completely outside the rehearsal process. Generous, thoughtful, funny and kind – he was everything I imagined.

“This is the last time I will see this play,” he said. The immensity of the words hangs in the air. “But I will outlive all of you.” How right he was.

Toby Jones: “The plays are full of gags.”

Everyone talks about Tom’s genius but in Every Good Boy Deserves Favor you also had this other side of him because it’s a brilliant conceptual piece of theatre. The idea of ​​having a live orchestra on stage and making the audience complicit with the reality of the orchestra and thus with someone who is supposedly hallucinating. You might not associate this with a visual theatrical feat even though there are acrobatics in Jumpers and the River Styx in The Invention of Love. His openness to experimenting with the national production, which brought dancers among the orchestra in a deviation from the original play, was truly striking.

My father shared a house with Tom when he was writing scripts for Mrs. Dale’s memoirs and had vivid memories of cigarette smoke as Tom bombed the episodes. He was a big figure in my life through those stories, and later at school I remember studying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for A-level. He, like Pinter, was one of the theater giants our generation grew up with. So when I finally met him, it was a joy to find him so personable.

When Tom and I took a bus trip together to the Calais jungle, I spent a lot of time listening to him talk about the vulnerability of these refugees and his personal connection to that situation. We crossed paths a bit after Every Good Boy and he always had this wonderful warmth to him – as opposed to someone being too smart to chat with you. The plays are full of gags and there is an appreciation for the different registers of the drama, on the one hand a collision of ideas but the theater is also a place for guts and guffaws.

Harriet Walter: “No one gives a skeevy a book token except Tom.”

Everyone on this page has been incredibly lucky. We all knew Tom Stoppard. We lived at the same time as him and enjoyed his brilliance up close. When I was 18 and not even a drama student, I was in charge of the props for the world premiere of Tom’s After Magritte. He was a very romantic and casual visitor to the training room. I appreciated the £5 book he gave me at the opening show. Nobody gives skeevy a book code! Tom did.

Skip ahead to much later and I’m playing Lady Crome, Thomasina’s volatile, over-sexualized mother in the first production of Arcadia. We all learned a little about chaos theory among many other topics that Tom brilliantly tied together in the play. Fortunately, Lady Chrom did not have to understand Chaos Theory, only to cause chaos with her rampant sexual lust, that rogue element that could not be controlled, explained, or predicted. I had lines that were so funny that I often couldn’t get to the end of them before the audience drowned me out with laughter. What an orgasm. What a gift from Tom.

Every other line in Arcadia dazzles, but Tom wasn’t about to show off. He was really happy to ask questions and share everything he discovered. And he manages to sneak some of the most profound messages about life, art, and the physical universe into the fabric of comedy. In Arcadia he puts an end to the division of art against science. He brings them together, illustrating the imaginative beauty of science and the calculated order within art.

Thomasina Coverley, the 13-year-old genius in the 19th-century part of the play, can understand mathematical concepts that fly over most of our heads. She can discover the physical principle at work by stirring the jam into her rice pudding. Hers is the first line in the play and is a question. She is endlessly curious and thoughtful while still being childish and playful.

She is rational but also emotional – she is moved to tears by the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria, and as the play advances three years, she has matured into a romantic young woman who loves her mentor, and although she dies in a fire on her sixteenth birthday, her accounts live on for posterity to interpret in wonder. I think all of this applies to Thomas Stoppard, who has almost the same name.