Sir Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was a playwright whose works combine dazzling verbal and theatrical flair with intellectual inquiry, and won him three Oliviers, five Tonies and an astonishing ten Evening Standard Theatre Awards. These recognized plays as diverse as his 1966 breakthrough hit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1982’s The Real Thing and the instant modern classic Arcadia in 1993. They also included special awards in 2011 saluting his work translating Russian drama, particularly Chekhov, and in 2014 proclaiming him Britain’s greatest living playwright.
“I feel a bit guilty, because I haven’t done anything [i.e. written a play] this year,” he said at the ceremony in 2014. “But then I remembered I got married.” Debunking his professional status with a joke about his recent third marriage - to Sabrina Guinness, part of the “banking line” of the eminent Guinness family - was typical of Stoppard, who retained an observer’s ironic distance despite having become very much part of the Establishment.
