The Player giving a bit of meta-commentary (meta-meta-commentary?) on plays in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:

"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."

I'll never forget the first time I heard his name. As a kid, I had seen the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun starring a young Christian Bale and considered it one of my favorites. When I was an adult eagerly showing it to friends, one of them who was a theater major loudly exclaimed during the opening credits, "Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay?!" I knew most of the names in the opening credits but had no idea who Tom Stoppard was until that moment.

When he passed away a couple days ago, I was surprised to discover he was originally from a Moravian town I've been to since one of my ancestors grew up 10 miles farther down the road. The twists and turns his family took escaping from there to the other side of the world and back no doubt enhanced his keen insight into people.

Tom Stoppard famously described Edinburgh as the "Reykjavik of the South" as a gibe about its claim to be the "Athens of the North".

Wrote a paper on "Shakespeare in Love" (and the original Shakespeare) for lit in highschool.

My paper wasn't any good. Really in retrospect or at the time.

How he had reinvented it, reinvigorated it. (TIL about banished Rama and Sita from the Bhagavad Gita.) But then I realized it would just be easier to be a critic.

Anyways, truly when I lucked into big time screenwriting gigs it was in part because of the time I had spent writing a paper about Tom Stoppard's work.

I also remember watching "Finding Forrester" a lot. Punch the keys!

I wrote an extended essay on “Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in high school… 1998-1999 period. I loved his screenplays even though I’m not a great fan of theatre in general. 88 is a ripe old age but it’s still deeply saddening.

I wish National Theatre would re-release the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead productions with Cumberbatch and Radcliffe in memoriam, either on NTatHome or in theatres...

GUIL: Hm?

ROS: Yes?

GUIL: What?

ROS: I thought you...

GUIL: No.

ROS: Ah.

I am here to recommend Jumpers. Not his most famous but one of his best. What a genius. RIP.

Arcadia was the best play ever.

He is not on a boat.

He had this to say at the start of the genocide in Gaza [1]:

> At the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, for example, British playwright Tom Stoppard said that, “Before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism.” He, of course, leaned towards the latter.

Which tells one everything that needs to be known about this vile character who happened to write some theatre plays.

[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241203-the-gaza-genocide...

The real inspector hound is a great short play for kids. Breaking the 4th wall.

I wonder how much art and science never came to be because the people who would have created it didn't escape the Nazi death machine, unlike Stoppard.

The entire group of "Martians" (von Neumann, Teller, Pólya, Szillard, von Kármán tec.) were Hungarian Jews. More than half of that community perished.