"What's it about?" was a frequent response from bemused theatre-goers to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Sir Tom Stoppard’s first stage triumph.
Tired of being asked, he is said to have replied to a woman outside a theatre on Broadway: "It’s about to make me very rich."
He later questioned whether he had said "very", Hermione Lee wrote in his authorised biography, but he had undoubtedly managed to transform his previously precarious finances.
For every puzzled spectator, there were many more ecstatic fans and critics, dazzled by the wit, brilliant wordplay and sheer daring of a young playwright who had turned Shakespeare inside out and placed the spotlight, not on the eponymous Hamlet, but on two minor characters from the same play.
First performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the following year, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead made Stoppard, at the age of 29, the youngest playwright to be staged at the National Theatre in London.
From there, the play went to Broadway and had more than 250 productions worldwide over its first decade.
Stoppard’s career flourished for decades more, embracing stage, screen and radio, and demonstrating his thirst to tackle any subject, from mathematics to Dadaist art to landscape gardening.
His final play, Leopoldstadt, first performed in 2020, follows the story of a Jewish family in Vienna inspired by his own history.
His many other successes included The Real Inspector Hound, which parodied stage whodunnits and sent up theatre critics, Jumpers, a 1.5 million word epic that delighted and confused its public, and Night and Day, a satire on the British media.
His densely packed, intricately constructed plays were based on extensive research. Arcadia, in 1993, considered by many critics to be his masterpiece, blended chaos theory, Isaac Newton and poet Lord Byron’s love life.
The word Stoppardian, first recorded in 1978, has entered the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the use of verbal gymnastics while addressing philosophical concepts.
The honours he won at home and abroad included an Oscar for co-authoring the screenplay of the 1998 hit film Shakespeare in Love, and a record five Tony awards for Best Play.
In 1997, he was knighted for his contributions to theatre.
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937, in what was then Czechoslovakia. His Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.
Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother, Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.
He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.
Despite showing academic prowess at school, Stoppard decided not to go to university. Instead, he went straight to work as a reporter on a local newspaper in Bristol, western England.
While he found reporting daunting, he threw himself into working as a theatre and cinema critic and his love of drama took hold.
He began making the influential friendships with actors and other writers that would shape his career. He made up his mind to move to London and start writing plays.
Theatre, first of all, was for fun, he said.
"Theatre is recreation, it must entertain. But does the audience have to understand everything they see? If you or I go into an art gallery, we don’t understand what the artist is trying to tell us, though we may enjoy the painting," he said in a 1995 interview.
He wrote short radio plays, before completing his first stage play in 1960. That work, A Walk on the Water (later reworked and retitled as Enter a Free Man) was a success, also being adapted for television.
While working as a drama critic, he received a grant which enabled him to write full-time for several months. The end result was the first draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the first in a series of theatrical successes which made his name.
Later in his career, he also ventured into film. He took the top award at the Venice Film festival in 1990 for his screen adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
He wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and earned an Oscar nomination for his work on Terry Gilliam’s cult 1985 hit Brazil before winning with Shakespeare in Love.
Stoppard had four sons, two from each of his first two marriages. He married his third wife, television producer Sabrina Guinness, in 2014.
His son Ed Stoppard is an actor, who performed in Leopoldstadt.
Critics hailed Stoppard for confronting his own family history in the play.
It marked the end of a theatrical journey that was willing to take on almost any subject matter.
In his 30s, he said: "I would like ultimately, before being carried out feet first, to have done a bit of absolutely everything."
He died on November 29, aged 88. — Reuters/Allied Media
