Past: Creative Rendering of the Past – Literature, Theater, Film

Tom Stoppard established himself as one of the few undisputed masters of the modern stage in 1966 with the play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”

Often challenging the prevailing intellectual and political views, he insisted on the need to affirm absolute values. Language is slippery, philosophy is elusive, science often baffling – but in Stoppard’s world there is a pervasive faith in goodness, beauty and love.

His first overtly historical work was Travesties, a play that emerged from the bizarre coincidence that James Joyce, the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin all lived in Zurich during World War I. Stoppard’s passionate engagement with his subject matter was always married to a dazzling theatricality and a genius for laughter. In Travesties, a complex examination of the purpose of art and the nature of political progress is conveyed through a farcical parody of Oscar Wilde.

But Stoppard’s cleverness was always tempered by a profound humanity and in what was perhaps his masterpiece – Arcadia – he explored the conflict between intellect and emotion, and delivered one of the most heartfelt meditations on love in 20th Century theater. In the process, he explicitly interlaced past and present as the worlds of the early 19th and late 20th centuries dissolve into each other in the same country house.

Stoppard translated Austrian author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and Austrian actor and playwright Johann Nestroy into English; he wrote screenplays including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love; and he was an energetic human rights campaigner, particularly engaged with the fate of political dissidents in the Soviet bloc. More recently, he continued his creative relationship with the past – The Invention of Love took the poet A E Housman as its subject. His trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia examined the roots of political radicalism in nineteenth century Russia. Rock ‘n Roll is a thrilling hymn to liberty that travels between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the present.

A later play, Leopoldstadt, is set in Vienna in the first half of the 20th Century and follows the lives of a “prosperous Jewish family who fled the pogroms in the East.”

Stoppard was as much showman as he was an intellectual, as much entertainer as philosopher, as much joker as seeker of truth. He was the only playwright to be named a member of the Order of Merit – Britain’s highest honor.

The 2008 Dan David Prize honored Tom Stoppard in the field of Creative Rendering of the Past: Literature, Theater, Film for being a master playwright whose plays return repeatedly to the past as part of his ceaseless search for meaning in a bewildering universe while demonstrating farcical cleverness alongside profound humanity.