After the first night of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre in London in 1967, Tom Stoppard awoke, like Lord Byron, and found himself famous. This new star in the playwriting firmament was a restless, questing bundle of contradictions. Stoppard wrote great theatre because, primarily, he wrote argumentative and witty dialogue. Writing plays, he said, was the only respectable way of contradicting oneself. His favourite line in modern drama was Christopher Hampton’s in The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions – at least, I think I am.”
Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was always patient about the demands of the publicity machine, though just as deeply averse, like Harold Pinter, to discussing his work, or indeed his private life, in public. Yet what one critic called “the hypnotised brilliance” of his English prose and dialogue fascinated journalists, as well as the public, who thought of Stoppard as “a bounced Czech” (he described himself thus, having been born in Moravia) with a showman’s flair and a curatorial devotion to his adopted language on a par with Conrad’s, or Nabokov’s.
