Where to Start with Tom Stoppard: From Brazil to Leopoldstadt | Tom Stoppard

SElections of excellence are traditionally considered among the top ten. However, given Sir Tom Stoppard’s great love of cricket – demonstrated in one of his most famous speeches – it seems appropriate that the First XI should be chosen from among his works for stage, screen, television and radio. There is no order of precedence: In cricket, any number on the card can change the rules of the game. (Most texts are published by Faber, details are broadcast where available.)

1. Arcadia (1993)

Stoppard’s most complex theatrical timescale cuts between an early 19th century English country house and a late 20th century one, creating subtle echoes and contrasts that explore literature, architecture, mathematics, physics and the elusiveness of historical truth. A joke about a hermit curious about current events is one of the playwright’s best works, and this haunting mid-career piece is among his most impressive and enlivening plays.

2. Brazil (1985)

Coming to England as a child after a fraught childhood in Czechoslovakia, Singapore and India, Stoppard developed an appreciation for local humor from the Goons via Morecambe and Wise to Monty Python. The latter Terry Gilliam hired Stoppard and Charles McKeown to write this brilliant sci-fi satire set in a bureaucratic dystopian society. The co-authorship does not mitigate the distinctive Stoppardian tone: a kind of Kafkaesque-Pythonic, uniting its original and adopted cultures. (Disney+/Apple TV+).

3. The Real Thing (1982)

Stoppard’s sixth major play was the first set in contemporary England. It’s a dazzling self-reflection, a West End comedy, with the playwright, Henry, writing a West End comedy starring his first wife, to whom he soon pays alimony after the events taking place within the plays. A dropped handkerchief (Othello) reveals a love affair that is then threatened by the temptation of adultery during a production revolving around incest (“Tis Pity She’s a Whore). Regular revivals – the latest at the Old Vic in autumn 2024 – reveal a masterful structure in which lines, scenes and props recur with different, darker meanings about where the truth lies in love, politics and art, Stoppard’s position revealed through the metaphor of the cricket bat.

4. Professional Mistake (1977)

The writer was ambiguous about this script, which he wrote in a few weeks after clashing with the BBC Television Commission. However – and it certainly calls for a soon-to-be rerun on BBC Four – its 85-minute run is one of the writer’s cleverest uses of his favorite device – parallel, overlapping worlds. A symposium of philosophers and linguists is being held in the same hotel in communist Czechoslovakia where the England football team is staying for a vital international match. Academic Anderson (Peter Barkworth), a football fan, who submits a paper in order to see the match, judges complex questions of Cold War whistleblowing.

5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1966) died

Stoppard’s reputation-making plays, as with many that followed them, used a classical play as a trampoline: Hamlet’s two young companion lords find themselves in the title and at the center of a beautiful mixture of Shakespeare and Stoppard’s lines and scenes. Beginning with a time-lapse coin-tossing scene that distorts the laws of probability, it highlights Stoppard’s comedic skills, leading some to overlook the underlying seriousness: the fifth word of the title is the key to this profound reflection on chance and mortality. In terms of Cricket, it is Stoppard’s most widely produced play, is frequently revived in the theater and is his only play to be made into a film, directed by Stoppard himself, in 1990. (Paramount+, BFI Player).

6. Rock and Roll (2006)/Leopoldstadt (2020)

The rules of cricket allow for a substitute XII, and these two plays seem inseparable as alternative biographies for Stoppard. Rock ‘n’ Roll moves between Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1989 (the dates of the powerful and successful revolutions in Eastern Europe), and imagines the playwright’s life had his family not fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia; Was he, under the subsequent communist occupation, a dissident or a collaborator? Inspired by the writer’s late-life realization that his family was entirely Jewish, Leopoldstadt, despite uprooting Stoppard’s family tree to Vienna, grapples with escaping the Holocaust that claimed all four of his grandparents. The concluding episode, set in 1955, featuring Leo, the author’s obvious stand-in, is one of Stoppard’s most painful and personal scenes.

7. The Dog That Died (1982)

There is an anecdote that Steven Spielberg called Stoppard to pitch a movie script for a zillion dollars. The writer regrets his assignment to the BBC, which raises the suspicion that he would turn down a TV film? Said reply: “No, the radio.” Of Stoppard’s 10 audio plays from 1964 to 2013, “The Dog That Died” — about a secret agent who can’t remember which side he’s on — stands out for its location-specific sound effects (a sick donkey scorched by hot tongs hurtles across the living room setting off several antique clocks), obsessive wordplay (“an abominable act” caused by toasted cheese) and an interest in the spy fantasy that led to Le Carré’s film. The adaptation of The Russian House (1990) and Stoppard’s spy drama, Hapgood (1988).

8. Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Stoppard shared the credit and Oscar with Mark Norman (who wrote the original) with this screenplay that extends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’s abundant Shakespearean scholarship by focusing on the playwright himself. Until his later alternative memoir plays, this was Stoppard’s most autobiographical work, dramatizing, four centuries later, the practicalities of the dramatic craft—the gruff producers, the polite actors, the commissions, the rewrites, the inspiration, and the falling in love with actors. (Apple TV+, Prime Video, BFI Player)

9. The Coast of Utopia (2002)

This broad trilogy about Russian intellectuals in European exile during the revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century was long and underwritten when it first ran in The National. But a shorter, more compact rewrite for Broadway in 2006 – which won Stoppard one of his five Tony Awards for Best Play – articulated some of the writer’s biggest ideas on recurring themes – dissidence, politeness, sexuality, paternal love, journalism – and these revised scripts are certain to merit their soon-to-be UK premiere.

10. End of Show (2012)

Theater and film had kept Stoppard away from television for three decades when he was persuaded to return with material too voluminous to be put on film – Ford Madox Ford’s series of novels, The End of the Show, in which a love triangle is set in London before and during World War I, giving Stoppard another shot at a favorite subject of a life pressed by history. Written during a nine-year theatrical drought – the longest of his career – it received his full attention both at the desk and on set and should feature in the BBC Television tribute. Also noteworthy is Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the physically and emotionally wounded aristocrat, Christopher Tietjens. (Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+)

11. The Real Inspector’s Dog (1968)

Without declaring this to be politics, Stoppard borrowed most theatrical forms – Shakespeare (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), sex comedy (Dirty Linen, 1976), romance (The Real Thing), musical (Ruff’s Crossing, 1984), thriller (Hapgood). His satirical mousetrap captures Agatha Christie’s The Real Inspector Hound, in which theater critics (Stoppard’s first career) reviewing a country-house murder mystery join in on the action amid effervescent play with words and structure.