"Stoppardian: Relating to or in the style of the English playwright Tom Stoppard (born in 1937), especially to designate a type of theater play or work characterized by verbal gymnastics and the juxtaposition of elegant wit and philosophical concerns".
Not every writer can aspire to have the 'Oxford Dictionary' recognize a word for them. Tom Stoppard, who passed away yesterday, Saturday, at 88 years old at his home in Dorset county, near the coast of the English Channel, achieved this in 1993. Stoppardian thus remains in the annals of the English language as a tribute to a writer many remember as the winner of the Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1998 for 'Shakespeare in Love', but whose career spans six decades in which he left his mark on the Anglo-Saxon scene.
Stoppard himself would find it amusing that his greatest mark in popular culture is the movie that made Gwyneth Paltrow famous and not works like 'Arcadia', where he mixes and intertwines the love life of Lord Byron, Romanticism, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and which not only was not an 'art film', but a gigantic success at the London National Theatre and on Broadway.
Therefore, nothing more Stoppardian than Stoppard himself. A Czech Jew, he escaped with his parents from his country when he was less than a year old after the European democracies' foresight to appease Hitler handed over what was then Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. This marked the beginning of a pilgrimage that took them to Singapore - where his father died in a Japanese prisoner camp - and to India. There, his mother married British military officer Kenneth Stoppard, Tomá became Tom, and he became a true-blooded Englishman.
Or, at least, as much of a "true-blooded" Englishman as someone like Stoppard could be. Because, although he always said he had never had any assimilation problems in the United Kingdom, he confessed that "I often find people who don't realize that I don't belong to the world we are in." That's why, "my characters are constantly called by names that are not theirs."
Stoppard did not go to university. Instead, he became a journalist at 17 years old. Although his true calling was writing for the stage. At that age, he began writing plays for radio theater, and shortly after completed his first play, 'A Walk on the Water'. Success was immediate, and Stoppard became a television writer and a playwright of considerable success. But his career reached a different level in 1966, with 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead', which made him the youngest author to have a play written by him at the London National Theatre. Thus, Stoppard became one of the kings of the Anglo-Saxon scene, navigating it with his ideology "conservative, but with a lowercase 'c'," as he himself said, and three marriages sprinkled with an endless list of infidelities, including with actor Jeremy Irons' wife, Sinéad Cusack.
'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' contains many of Stoppard's permanent elements: a text bordering on the absurd and the philosophical, playing with the audience and the actors themselves, as it is actually a play that unfolds on the sidelines of another play, Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. These are the notes that, with different variations, reappear in many of his over thirty works, including screenplays, television scripts, and radio plays, in all of which he always managed to leave the audience surprised and much more intrigued than when the performance began.