Master of plot and bon mots

British playwright Tom Stoppard reinvigorated the comedy of ideas.

- CHARLES McNULTY THEATER CRITIC

WALLY SKALIJ Los Angeles Times
TOM STOPPARD, pictured in 2016, was known as distinctly apolitical.

Tom Stoppard, dead? Surely, someone has made a hash of the plot. Yes, he was 88, but the Czech-born, British playwright, the true 20th century heir to Oscar Wilde, would never have arranged things so banally.

“A severe blow to Logic” is how a character describes the death of a philosophy professor in Stoppard’s 1972 play “Jumpers.” But then, as this polymath wag continues, “The truth to us philosophers, Mr. Crouch, is always an interim judgment... Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?”

Few people were more agnostically alive than Stoppard, who loved the finer things in life and handsomely earned them with his inexhaustible wit. A man of consummate urbanity who lived like a country squire, he was a sportsman (cricket was his game) and a connoisseur of ideas, which he treated with a cricketer's agility and vigor.

Stoppard himself with "Rosencrantz and announced Are Guildenstern Dead," an absurdist lark that views "Hamlet" from the keyhole perspective of two courtiers jockeying for position in the new regime.

The influence of Samuel Beckett was unmistakable in the combination of music hall zaniness and existential ruthlessness that characterized the succession of early plays that merged the Theatre of the Absurd with a souped-up version of Shavian farce.