Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation

When Tom Stoppard died, on November 29th, at the age of eighty-eight, he left behind a theatre changed by his blistering intellect and blazing success, the heat and light that made the rest of our English-language garden grow. You might say that Shakespeare has his points, or that Samuel Beckett had his day. But Stoppard’s enviable gifts—“his looks, his talents, his money and his luck,” as the playwright and memoirist Simon Gray said—made him our current theatre’s primary influence, even in such vivid company.