"At necessary moments in my life, Tom Stoppard, the preeminent British playwright who died last Saturday, has popped up like one of his frenetic characters, spouting enigmatic lines and leaving me thrilled, confused, and somehow heartened. The first time, I was in graduate school, reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his breakthrough homage to Hamlet; I was surely thinking grad-school thoughts when I came across the line "the toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all"-the best bad joke ever."
"This wildly ambitious epic of the mind opened at the National Theatre, in London, in the summer of 2002; it is made up of three plays with a total running time of nine hours, and it features a group of 19th-century Russian writers and activists, some famous and some obscure, who argue about political philosophy and muddle through messy lives. I wish I'd had the courage to sit through one of the marathon performances of all three plays at once-instead"
Tom Stoppard wrote plays that combine intellectual rigor, humor, and human warmth. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead plays with existential jokes and wordplay. Leopoldstadt centers on a Jewish family in 20th-century Vienna and reflects personal discovery of Jewish identity, offering resonance during the pandemic. The Coast of Utopia is a nine-hour trilogy about 19th-century Russian writers and activists debating political philosophy while negotiating family and messy lives. Stoppard's work treats resistance to totalitarianism as human, grounded in family and personal experience, and remains notable for its wit. Many performances inspired strong personal responses and long-lasting impressions.
Read at The Atlantic
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