From 1977: For the playwright, art is a game within a game—the larger game being life itself, an absurd mosaic of incidents and accidents.

A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...

Tom Stoppard, the award-winning writer of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, Leopoldstadt and Shakespeare in Love, has died aged 88

Irish actor, playwright and peace campaigner whose activism permeated her work in theatre

BRITAIN has excelled at new writing since literally the war.