Every Exit Is an Entry Somewhere: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025

For some reason, the 2000-2001 school year in Olympia, Washington, was The Year of Stoppard. A good friend of mine, Heidi-rose, appeared in Arcadia. I’m pretty sure a small theatre downtown staged Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I don’t remember what all else; I’d have to check back issues of The Cooper Point Journal. But the chant around the newsroom that year, led by our intrepid Arts and Entertainment editor and later author of Junior Braves of the Apocalypse Michael Tanner was “Tom Stoppard! Tom Stoppard! Ain’t no stoppin’ that Tom Stoppard!” I knew who he was before then—I saw him win his Oscar and even then could guess which jokes he’d added in his rewrite—but I’ll never not think of him that way.

Stoppard was in fact born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, at the time Czechoslovakia. His father was a doctor for the Bata shoe company; just before the German invasion, the Jewish employees of the company were transferred to branches outside Europe. The Sträusslers escaped to Singapore. Then, before the Japanese invasion, Tomáš, his mother, and his brother were able to escape to India. His father stayed as a British army volunteer, eventually drowning during his own flight when his boat was sunk by the Japanese. He spent four years in an American multicultural school, where he started going by Tom, after which his mother married a British army major named Kenneth Stoppard, who took the family to the UK.

Stoppard worked very hard to be as British as he could; his stepfather apparently considered being British to be the best thing you could be. He also insisted that his new wife and stepsons basically ignore their Judaism, meaning it took many years before Stoppard discovered all four of his grandparents had been killed at Theresienstadt. When Stoppard became more interested in exploring his Jewish roots, in 1996, his still-living stepfather tried to force him to stop going by Stoppard so that the name wouldn’t be associated with a Jew. The whole thing is a lot.

But two years later, it would be associated with a Best Original Screenplay winner for Shakespeare in Love; I assume all the jokes that rely on knowledge of Elizabethan England and the theatre are from Stoppard, which may or may not be fair. He was already a nominee for the screenplay for Brazil, having lost to Witness. The next year, it would be associated with a knighthood; in 1997, he became Sir Tom Stoppard. I’m shocked he never won a BAFTA, but the list of awards he won is long and distinguished.

Stoppard had a wicked sense of humour and a gift for timing. His plays explored the human condition. We are extraordinarily lucky to have had them; the sequence of events that led to his being alive, much less being able to write plays, left many opportunities for a young refugee boy to vanish from history the way so many others have. I got the news of his death at about the same time that I learned that Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure fame was stopped by ICE. So yeah, a bit of a through line there.