NYT

By Lisa Van Dusen

December 3, 2025

It was often said, including by the playwright himself, that Tom Stoppard lived a charmed life. Which makes it only fitting that he died a charmed death.

In life as on the stage, timing is everything. Stoppard died at 88 on Saturday at his home in Dorset surrounded by family, after enough years to have written, birthed and enjoyed the triumph of his biographical masterwork, Leopoldstadt, with five years to spare.

He exited in typically elegant fashion a world well on its way to making the one he entered as Tomáš Sträussler in 1937, in the Moravian city of Zlin, look sane.

On March 15th, 1939, the day Hitler marched in, his family fled Czechoslovakia. His father, Eugen, was a doctor for the Bata shoe company, which helped them flee to the company’s operation in Singapore. In 1942, as the Japanese invaded, Tom, his mother, Martha, and brother, Petr, fled again to India. Eugen stayed behind to serve British forces and was killed in a Japanese bombardment. In Darjeeling, Martha married a British Army major named Kenneth Stoppard.

Stoppard’s early life was defined by two determinants of history that have changed drastically in this century: war and sanctuary.

The world war that chased the Straüsslers across two continents was first waged by territorial expansionism, a form of aggression that obviously still exists but has largely been overtaken as a method of power consolidation by the control of outcomes via corruption capture thanks to a millennial confluence of motive, opportunity, and technology.

He was a refugee twice over, or as he famously said, a “bouncing Czech”, at a time when the principle of sanctuary was so universally assumed that it was still more honoured in the observance than in the notorious breach.

Today, amid a contagion of border hardening justified by a range of rationales from mismanagement to security to Donald Trump’s cruel and unusual immigration policy stylings, the right to seek refuge in a country not your own has become yet another target on the autocratic world order hit list that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1946, the Stoppard family moved to Nottingham, where Tom, by his own account, was warmly welcomed by the extended family of his rather cold stepfather in a country still reeling in the wake of the nightmare from which it had saved the world.

This turned out to be the perfect place for a precocious refugee from that war’s worst acts of inhumanity. Stoppard later discovered that many of his Jewish relatives, including all four grandparents, had perished in Nazi death camps. That knowledge inspired Leopoldstadt.

Impatient to meet the man he would become, Stoppard dropped out of school at 17 to be a reporter for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, then the Bristol Evening World, where, as a drama critic, he fell madly in love with both the theatre and his second language.

After the usual false starts, what he did next in writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead marked a revelation — some would say revolution — in both theatre and language.

He was a refugee twice over, or as he famously said, a ‘bouncing Czech’, at a time when the principle of sanctuary was so universally assumed that it was still more honoured in the observance than in the notorious breach.

He had taken on the undisputed, universal and eternal master of the theatre and the language, used the language to turn Hamlet inside out, made tragedy comedy, and dropped it into the 1966 Edinburgh Fringe like a cultural bomb. It didn’t bomb, it exploded, and introduced the world to a generational genius.

Stoppard possessed a number of qualities and characteristics for which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern provided a verbal MRI: he was brilliant, he was iconoclastic, he was witty, he didn’t just play with the English language, he forensically fiddled it into submission — not to dominate but to liberate it.

He valued truth above convention, and authenticity above orthodoxy. Most of all, he clearly adored humanity in all of its miraculous variety and foible, and his life — spanning from war on humanity to war on humanity — could not have been lived as he lived it except in a democracy.

The plays he went on to leave behind – Travesties, Night and Day, Hapgood, Arcadia, and 30 more, 19 of them produced on Broadway — were all love letters to a flawed, striving, endlessly fascinating species.

Today, in some parts of the world, these qualities will get you into a considerable amount of trouble. If we can describe the tectonic global shift of the past quarter century away from democracy, human rights and freedom and toward tyranny as pathocratic, which, given its origins and organigram, seems fitting, the qualities of “suppression of creativity and competence” and “elevation of incompetence” that define the model are precisely the sort of pre-emptive, defensive sorting that chokes the Tom Stoppards of the world in their creative cribs.

Stoppard knew all about repression and fought for freedom of speech for playwrights and freedom from persecution for victims of tyranny in places we once thought of as stuck in the human-rights past but which, it turns out, were previewing the human-rights future.

His friendship with fellow playwright Václav Havel, who ultimately prevailed against repression to become president of the same country Stoppard had fled as a child, seemed fated.

In a tribute piece this week, Kyiv Post editor Bohdan Nahaylo recalled working with Stoppard in London in the 1970s for the cause of Soviet dissidents. “When others might have been content to write a check, Stoppard showed up,” Nahaylo writes. “He understood that political theater fails when it preaches, succeeds when it illuminates complexity.”

Among his other political plays, after visiting the Soviet Union in 1977 with Amnesty International, Nahaylo recalls, Stoppard wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, about a Soviet dissident politically confined in a mental institution alongside a legitimate psychiatric patient who believes he conducts an invisible orchestra. In the play, André Previn conducted. “His dissidents were not saints but human beings,” Nahaylo writes, “flawed, frightened, and funny.”

Stoppard’s powers — of linguistic agility, of universalizing experience, of empathy, and of the charisma that amplified and globalized it all — would likely have been greeted differently had he come of age in a society in which the nominally most-powerful man in the world epitomizes a pathology of weaknesses misrepresented as strengths and repurposed for treason and destruction.

In 1984, in the margins of a speech that Havel wrote but could not deliver in Lyon because he was consigned to a surveillance prison in his own home, Stoppard, about to deliver it for him, scrawled: “All political questions are moral questions.”

He was born at the right time to make of himself a gift for humanity, and died at the right time in a world that likely would have obstructed that legacy.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.