Tom Stoppard, who died recently at 88, was universally recognized as one of our greatest playwrights and screenwriters.
Yet, the Czech-British writer was also an avowed libertarian. While that lesser-known latter fact was mentioned over the years in some profiles and in a few obits, it deserves more attention.
Especially when one realizes that some of Stoppard’s greatest plays have libertarian themes and that he co-wrote the screenplay for Brazil, one of the most libertarian films of the past four decades.
Known for his imagination, arch cleverness and word play, Stoppard invested his works with both humor and poignance, in the process adding rich dimensions to our humanity.
According to Wikipedia, his distinctive brand of writing became so well-known that ‘Stoppardian’ became a term “describing works using wit and comedy while addressing philosophical concepts.”
THE LIBERTARIAN THEMES OF STOPPARD
As noted in his encyclopedia bios, Stoddard’s work for stage, film, television and radio often covered the themes of human rights, political freedom and censorship, and the positive and potentially redeeming impact of culture on politics.
A recent tribute to Stoppard posted on the free-market-supporting website of the Foundation for Economic Education hails the writer for his deep understanding of, and advocacy for individual liberty.
In his essay, Diego Costa, FEE President Diego Costa praises Stoppard for dramatizing “the themes related to human freedom and human knowledge, as well as the forces that threaten them.”
“Stoppard presented an existential view of freedom. Freedom is not merely an instrumental means to something else. It is a constitutive part of what it means to be a human mind that thinks and acts in the world. This is why free people do not have to be politically motivated to threaten a totalitarian system. They just need to act and think as free people,” Costa writes.
THE EVOLUTION OF A GREAT PLAYWRIGHT
Compared by critics to Shakespeare and Shaw, Stoppard first made his international reputation in the mid-1960s with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his Tony-winning existentialist play centering the tragicomically limited perspective of two minor characters from Hamlet.
Perhaps his clearest libertarian themes were explored in The Coast of Utopia, a 2002 trilogy of plays focusing on the philosophical debates in pre-revolution Russia between 1833 and 1866. The trilogy won the 2007 Tony award for best play.
Offering insights about The Coast of Utopia, Costa notes that Stoppard was directly inspired by the great classical liberal/libertarian Isaiah Berlin to write that trilogy about Russian intellectual history.
“What Stoppard found in Isaiah Berlin was a framework for understanding freedom that cut against the grain of revolutionary idealism. Berlin drew a famous distinction between negative and positive liberty: freedom from interference versus freedom to achieve some higher self or collective goal.
“In The Coast of Utopia, Bakunin dreams of a freedom that will arrive after the revolution, when the old order has been swept away and humanity can finally become what it was always meant to be. Herzen, by contrast, insists on freedom as it can be lived now, in the present, by actual people with their actual desires and limitations.”
“Stoppard saw that the concept of positive liberty, however noble in aspiration, can be twisted into its opposite,” Costa observes.
“If true freedom means realizing your “higher” self, then those who claim to know what your higher self requires can justify coercing you in the name of liberation. The revolutionary who forces you to be free speaks as if he is liberating while conscripting you into someone else’s vision of the good. Berlin saw this logic at work in Soviet communism, in fascism, in every system that sacrificed present human beings for the sake of an imagined future perfection.
As Stoppard later put it, “positive freedom in the USSR meant empty shops, rubbish goods and rubbish lives for millions, but that was not the point for me, that was not the dystopia. The horror was the loss of personal responsibility, of personal space in the head, the loss of autonomy, of the freedom to move freely, and the ultimate Orwellian nightmare which is not to know what you have lost.”
OTHER STOPPARD PLAYS
Also exploring libertarian and anti-authoritarian themes is Rock ’n’ Roll, exploring the repressive socialist regime in Czechoslovakia and the role of popular culture and anti-authoritarian rock music in the emergence of the democratic movement and resistance to communism among the younger generation between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
Revealingly, that play was conceived following more than a decade of Stoppard’s work with human-rights issues, especially addressing political dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe, and meeting and becoming an admirer of Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and future president of the Czech Republic.
Among Stoppard’s other notable plays: Arcadia (1993); The Real Thing (1982); Travesties (1974); and Night and Day (1978), a post-colonialist satire on the British news media. (Stoppard dedicated that play to his friend Paul Johnson, the conservative/classical-liberal historian.)
WHAT HE LEARNED FROM HIS LIFE
Born to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. After spending three years at a boarding school in the Indian Himalayas, he settled with his family after the war in England in 1946. Growing up, Stoppard worked as a journalist and drama critic before turning in 1960 to playwriting.
“His biography gave Stoppard something that theoretical defenders of liberty often lack: the personal knowledge of what it means when freedom fails. Relatives of his had died in concentration camps, and he did not learn their names until he was in his fifties,” Costa writes.
Stoppard didn’t fully realize and come to terms with his Jewish heritage or his family’s troubled history until late in life, prompting him to write the masterwork that many have hailed as his greatest play: Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna.
The play won London’s Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2023 Tony award for Best Play – the fifth top Tony award for Stoppard’s plays.
Woven into many of Stoppard’s more enduring works are an understanding of the importance of individual rights, personal liberties and economic freedom – often mingled with compassion for human striving and suffering.
“Stoppard called himself a “timid libertarian,” Costa observed.
“He distrusted grand ideological pronouncements, having seen where they led in the 20th century. Instead, he explored freedom’s stakes through worlds that are simultaneously fantastic, deeply personal, and tragically incomplete.
Stoddard understood, Costa writes, that “the utilitarian case for liberty—that it produces better outcomes, more prosperity, greater innovation—is true but incomplete. Freedom is valuable in itself, as an expression of human dignity, as the necessary condition for a present and meaningful life.”
A personal note: During my four-decade-plus career as a newspaper theater critic, when I routinely visited New York annually to catch up with the most significant Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals, I counted myself fortunate to see and review several Stoppard plays – including Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock ’n’ Roll (2006.)
All are solid dramatic works laced with wisdom, wit, pathos and flashes of brilliance. Based just on the Stoppard plays I’ve seen, Arcadia seems the most haunting in its dual-focus exploration of history, memory, science and art in two different centuries amid the challenging goal of grasping the elusive truth of reality.
I retired from my journalism career some years before the Broadway production of Leopoldstadt, his last and by many reports, perhaps greatest play.
I wish I could have seen it.
Coming up soon on the Prometheus Blog: Stoppard, Part 2, focusing on Stoppard’s screenplays and the case for nominating Brazil in 2026 for the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
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