THE PLAYWRIGHT WHO
CHOSE RADIO OVER JAWS

Steven Spielberg had asked Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn’t as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg said, “I’m offering you a fortune to collaborate with me on a Hollywood blockbuster, and you turn me down to write a play for BBC TV?”

“No,” Tom said, “BBC Radio.”

This story, as recounted by David Mamet, contains everything you need to know about Tom Stoppard, who died at 88: the modesty disguising absolute certainty, the preference for the intimate over the spectacular, the faith that the theater of the mind trumps even mechanical sharks and box office glory. It’s a quintessentially Stoppardian moment, witty and self-deprecating, quietly insisting on values that the rest of the world has forgotten or never knew existed. That he would choose the most invisible medium for drama, the one where language must do all the work because there’s literally nothing else, tells you where his allegiance lay. Not with spectacle. Not with money. With words, and with the peculiar contract between playwright and audience that says: I will make you think, and you will do the work of imagining.

For more than six decades, Stoppard made us work. He made us laugh while we worked, certainly. No playwright since Shaw has been so reliably, electrically funny. But the laughter was never the point. The point was always underneath: the ethical puzzles, the philosophical quandaries, the way language both reveals and conceals what we mean, the question of whether human beings can ever really know anything at all. His plays are Möbius strips of logic and feeling, where a joke about Zeno’s paradox slides into genuine anguish about mortality, where linguistic fireworks illuminate real darkness.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead made him famous at thirty, but it’s tempting to see it now as a kind of decoy, brilliant as it is. The real Stoppard, the one who would matter most, emerged more clearly in Arcadia, in The Real Thing, in The Coast of Utopia: a writer fascinated by how ideas move through history, how personal and political are always entangled, how love and revolution and mathematics are all expressions of the same human hunger for meaning. He was a classicist when everyone else was doing naturalism, an optimist when cynicism sold better, a formalist who made form feel like freedom rather than constraint.

The 2020 premiere of Leopoldstadt revealed something we might have sensed but never quite seen so nakedly: Stoppard’s long reckoning with his own hidden history. Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, he spent most of his life not knowing, or not fully knowing, that he was Jewish, that his mother had concealed their identity to protect him, that relatives he never met had died in the Holocaust. When he learned the truth in his late fifties, it detonated quietly in his work, appearing first in glancing references, then more substantially in Rock ‘n’ Roll, and finally, exhaustively, devastatingly, in Leopoldstadt.

The play follows a prosperous Viennese Jewish family from 1899 to 1955, watching as their assimilated confidence curdles into catastrophe. It’s also his simplest. No time-travelling shenanigans, no dueling timelines, just the forward march of history crushing people who thought they’d escaped history. What makes it unbearable is how much they love their lives, how real their happiness is before it’s annihilated. Stoppard gives them wit and arguments and Christmas trees and all the good reasons they have for believing they’re safe, and then he shows us that none of it mattered. The play’s final scene, in which a middle-aged Englishman (a stand-in for Stoppard himself) confronts what he didn’t know about where he came from, damn near stops your heart. This is the cost of assimilation, the play says. This is what it means to forget. This is what it means, late, too late, to remember.

I saw the 2015 revival of Jumpers at the Old Vic, with Simon Russell Beale as George Moore, the philosopher who can’t quite prove that God exists while his wife Dotty (Essie Davis, incandescent) unravels in the bedroom. Beale played Moore’s intellectual paralysis as a kind of tenderness. Here was a man who believed in absolute values but couldn’t defend them against the logical positivists doing literal gymnastics in his living room. Davis made Dotty’s breakdown feel like the sanest response to a world drained of meaning. The production was a reminder that Stoppard’s plays, for all their cerebral fireworks, are also deeply compassionate. He knows that ideas have consequences, that philosophy isn’t a game, that people get hurt when we can’t figure out what’s true.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, which I saw at the Royal Court in 2006 with Brian Cox anchoring the production as Max, a rigid Communist academic watching his certainties crumble, might be Stoppard’s most moving play about the relationship between politics and personal life. Set against the backdrop of Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion, and the Velvet Revolution, it asks whether rock music, specifically the music of the Plastic People of the Universe, can be a form of resistance. Can art change anything? Does it matter if it can’t? Cox gave Max a furious dignity, a man who’d built his identity on a historical narrative that was collapsing. When the Berlin Wall falls and he has nothing left to believe in, Cox made you understand that this wasn’t just ideological defeat but existential obliteration. That Stoppard could make you feel sympathy for a Stalinist without softening the critique of Stalinism, that’s the radical fairness of his work, the refusal to caricature anyone.

But it’s The Invention of Love, which I saw on Broadway in 2001, that remains my favorite Stoppard play, the one that seems to contain all of him most perfectly. A.E. Housman is ferried across the Styx by Charon, looking back on his life as a closeted homosexual and obsessive classicist, meeting his younger self along the way. The play is about everything Stoppard cares about: the relationship between scholarship and passion, the way we bury our desires in our work, the question of whether a life devoted to emending Latin texts is more or less meaningful than a life devoted to living. Richard Easton played the elder Housman with such devastating restraint, all that unlived life calcified into precision and bitterness. Robert Sean Leonard’s young Housman still had hope, still believed that getting Propertius exactly right might somehow compensate for never telling Moses Jackson (his unrequited crush) the truth. The play asks whether beauty can be a substitute for love, and it answers: no, but it’s what we have. Watching it, you understood that Stoppard was writing about himself, about what it costs to dedicate your life to getting the words exactly right, about the loneliness of caring about things that most people don’t even know exist. It’s his most achingly personal play, even more than Leopoldstadt, because it’s about the choice to live in language rather than in the world. And it suggests, heartbreakingly, that maybe there’s no choice at all, that some of us are simply made this way.

What made Stoppard matter wasn’t just that he was clever, though God knows he was clever, cleverer than almost anyone writing for the stage. It was that he believed cleverness should be in service of something: of truth, of beauty, of human dignity. He wrote as though theater could still be a place where serious ideas are taken seriously, where arguments about free will or artistic responsibility or the nature of love aren’t just dramatized but actually argued, where the audience is trusted to keep up. While everyone else was doing therapeutic realism and devised work and immersive experiences, Stoppard’s plays stood apart: unapologetically literate, structurally audacious, emotionally genuine beneath their glittering surfaces.

He was also, let’s be clear, a royalist, a conservative, a defender of institutions and traditions that plenty of us find exasperating. But even when you disagreed with him, you had to admire the integrity of the work. He never pandered or simplified. He gave every position its best possible articulation with real generosity. His politics were in his form as much as his content: he believed in craft, in revision, in getting it right. He made art as though it mattered, not as self-expression, not as therapy, but as a way of thinking through problems that couldn’t be solved any other way.

Leopoldstadt ends with a single word, a name, spoken by the Leo character who is Stoppard’s avatar: “Vienna.” It’s the simplest possible line, and it contains everything. The city lost, the family annihilated, the identity recovered too late to save anyone. In that word you can hear the whole project of Stoppard’s late career: the excavation of what was buried, the reckoning with what it cost to forget, the attempt to honor the dead by remembering them truly.

Tom Stoppard chose radio over Jaws because he understood that some things matter more than money or fame or even success. He spent his life making plays that ask whether anything means anything. In the asking, he proved that it does. Language matters. Memory matters. The work of thinking clearly and feeling deeply matters. While the culture offers shortcuts and easy answers, Stoppard insisted on complexity without apology. He leaves behind work that will endure because it never condescends to its audience. It doesn’t simplify. It believes audiences are capable of meeting him where he is. And where he is, always, is somewhere worth going.