With his restless imagination, Tom Stoppard has shown us a mind in motion | Tom Stoppard

TStoppard’s astonishing play opens on a bare stage, with two characters in the middle of nowhere flipping a coin. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, notorious minor characters from the lower reaches of Hamlet’s roster, meet actors on the road to Elsinore, encounter the haughty Danish court, and board a ship that takes them to their unintended deaths—but they don’t really go anywhere, except out of their merry and bewildered minds. They are always on the road to nowhere, far from home. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, and they’re the only ones who don’t know it.

Some writers create a dramatic area so recognizable that you could write it into your sat nav. Harold Pinter’s squalid suburbia, David Hare’s deceitful establishment, Caryl Churchill’s insular dystopia. The house in Stoppard is an episodic motif: often historically and geographically accurate, but rarely found in the same place twice. He is hardly a biographer, but the biography gives an idea. Born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1937, Thomas Straussler was not even two years old when his family left the country during the Nazi invasion. Then came Singapore and Darjeeling, and after his mother’s second marriage, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Bristol. Later came tours behind the Iron Curtain to support dissident artists with Amnesty International and Qalam Al-Qalam. Stoppard was the image of the cosmopolitan intellectual, a restless, rootless fantasy. But where do his plays feel at home?

The play that perhaps most accurately reflects his daily life – The Real Thing (1982), about a famous London playwright who agonizes over his choice of music for his Desert Island discs – is, in my opinion, one of his least interesting plays. Far more engaging are works that wander across time and place – pre-revolutionary Russia, colonial India, Georgian Britain, and various points of Central Europe.

“The Real Thing” is often thought to represent a twist in Stoppard’s work—one in which the skilled brain decides to share the stage with the aching heart. It’s not entirely fair – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s bewilderment over a missing puppy, and the heroes’ hilarious frustrations in Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974), all end with a stab of distress.

However, you can chart the evolution of Stoppard’s work by looking at his closest collaborators. The director of choice early in his career was Peter Wood, a mandarin of period comedy. “It’s my fascination with verbal language that leads me toward comedy,” Stoppard said. In Jumpers and Travesties and On the Razzle (1981), Wood crafts short poems that also sparkle and bite. Trevor Nunn’s embrace of the symphony informed Stoppard’s later plays, framing the rich historicism and satirical romanticism of Arcadia (1993) and The Coast of Utopia (2002).

Stoppard quipped that he wanted Morecambe and Weisz to play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in his 1966 play, but you can get a sense of his priorities by looking at the actors he actually wrote for: the satirical Diana Rigg (Jumpers, Night and Day) was followed by the rough-and-tumble Felicity Kendall in The Real Thing, Arcadia and Hapgood (1988). Stoppard’s favorite male voice remained constant – questioning, wistful players like John Wood (Travesties, The Invention of Love), Bill Nighy (Arcadia) and Stephen Dillane (The Coast of Utopia). Collaborations can create temporary homes in a non-permanent theatre; Such shifting relationships suggest the kind of family that made Stoppard’s plays feel comfortable over the course of his career.

Stoppard’s edits are rarely revived or commented on, but they appear to be decisive works that enhanced his sensibility. He may have left Central Europe behind as an infant, but its culture was seeped into his writings. Stoppard’s choices as an adapter are revealing—no Ibsen, Strindberg, or Brecht (except for an unproduced screenplay based on The Life of Galileo). Chekhov was laughing through tears much more. There were bright-eyed versions of The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov. The distinctive style of these plays—in which characters argue about domestic life and speculate about the future, even as the present crumbles beneath them—certainly left its mark, especially on “The Coast of Utopia.”

More telling still are the beautifully crafted versions of lesser-known plays from Europe’s pie belt. Vienna is the setting for three works that premiered at the National Theater between 1979 and 1986. These are some of Stoppard’s most entertaining texts, especially the delirious pun On the Razzle, after Johan Nestroy, in which two apprentices escape into the city for a day of high jinks and extraneous humour, full of comical waiters, artificial Scotsmen and one delicious one. One zinger after another. (“Duplicate? The plowman’s lunch is six oysters and cream of mint.”) While Stoppard curbed wordplay in his original plays, Nestroy’s reckless farce gave free rein to wordplay.

Two bittersweet plays by Arthur Schnitzler pointed the way to Arcadia. Small tragedies of pointless duels and the lost souls they leave in their wake opened a door to Stoppard’s heart. An Undiscovered Country (1979) has narrative breadth, keeping more than a dozen important characters in the play, as it traces the secret infidelities of the bourgeoisie through an Alpine hotel and villa in Vienna. The most direct is Dalliance (1986), where an officer’s bite to the side, a loose end forgotten after his death, occupies our attention. “I worshiped him,” she says bitterly. “He was God and salvation – and I was his day off.”

All of these qualities fuel Stoppard’s lavish maturity—the panorama, the planning, the iron, the irony. It is not surprising that Arcadia takes place in a library—or at least in a room often used for reading—because it is, in part, a play about the way books can become home, even if they are lost or misunderstood. There are still great jokes. History is a great joke, destined to be misread by future generations who will not understand it or will laugh in all the wrong places. Byron is credited with verses and love poems not of his own authorship; Thomasina, the Georgian mathematical genius, is not given any credit at all. History is a loss, so we must carry the loss with us. Here is Thomasina’s teacher consoling her over the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria:

We fall when we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we leave behind will be picked up by those behind us. The procession is too long and life is too short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so there is nothing to lose. The lost plays of Sophocles will emerge piece by piece, or be written again in another language… Don’t you suppose, madam, that if the whole of Archimedes were hidden in the great library of Alexandria, we should lose the key?

It’s easy to think of Stoppard as a wordsmith, because his words are so flamboyant, but he’s also an imagemaker. The acrobats dressed as canaries in Jumpers, and Charon the boatman rowing poetically to the underworld in The Invention of Love (1997). And the final waltz in Arcadia – two waltzes, one past and one present, swoop around each other heartbreakingly and unrequitedly.

In the Utopia Coast trilogy, the most brilliant minds of an entire generation are swept out from under it. Set in mid-19th-century Russia, the work shows revolutionaries, liberals, free-lovers, and exploiters leaving tsarist oppression but struggling to build a new home in Paris, London, or Berlin. They take Russia with them, even when it rejects them. Stoppard’s hero is not Karl Marx (reduced to a militant secondary character) or the arrogant anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; Surprisingly, perhaps, it is not even the world-famous novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev. Instead, he is Alexander Herzen, a socialist who oscillates between caring for his family and the cradle of revolution, pouring his heart and money into imaginative projects that seem urgent now but are tantalizingly vague to us, watching from the skeptical future.

At the heart of the trilogy, in the poignant play Shipwreck, Herzen is about to head into another exile, with another devastating loss of shelter, wife, and young child. In the midst of the great event, it is a painful moment. “Because children grow, we believe that the child’s goal is to grow up,” he says. “But the goal of a child is to be a child. Nature does not despise what lives for only a day. She pours out all of herself at every moment… For the death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies and nations. Was the child happy while it was alive? That is the right question, the only question. If we cannot arrange our own happiness, it is vanity beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.”

Stoppard’s latest play, Leopoldstadt, arrives in 2020 with an unexpected dip into Jewish identity. It is not a direct autobiography, but traces the travails of a wealthy Austrian Jewish family over the half-century from 1899. The title refers to Vienna’s unintelligent ghetto – not where this posh family lived, but where they came from. The lack of complete acceptance casts a pall over their lives – and, as Stoppard admits, it has quietly cast a pall over his own. He even portrays himself relentlessly in Leo, the young English writer who visits Vienna again in a realistic ending. The almost swirling, chaotic crowd of characters in the opening scenes becomes an almost empty stage, just a trio of survivors. Once again, it is only what we carry in our hearts and heads that takes us into the future.

What will the future need from Stoppard? Which plays will last and which will fade away? I think plays that look at Arcadia as implausible or at an impossible utopia should continue. Stoppard is not exactly about the immigrant century, but his work is an allegory of the mobile mind: ready to pack up and move on, with only intellectual capital stitched like a diamond into the lining of a jacket. Principles, paradoxes, a lifetime of reading and a few good jokes – travel light, it’s always good.