Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
The death was announced on social media by United Agents, which has represented him. No other details were provided.
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Stoppard. 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.
Among his best known plays are The Real Thing (1982), a Tony Award-winning contemporary tale about the marriage of a playwright and an actress that considers the intersection of love and literature; Arcadia (1993), an Olivier Award winner (the British equivalent of the Tonys), which concerns the human desire to acquire knowledge and the ways in which the most well-educated people misuse, misinterpret or misunderstand it; and The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy devoted to an excitable Russian intelligentsia in 19th-century Czarist Russia.
New York Times News Service