THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Rosencrantz: Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.

Another day, another famous death. 2025 has certainly kept the Grim Reaper busy, swinging his scythe through the creative arts. There’s no real need for me to repeat the decades-long successes that Tom Stoppard enjoyed in British theatre, beginning most notably with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966 and concluding his fifty-year career more recently with Leopoldstadt in 2019; they are simply too numerous to list without risking boredom for both you, the reader, and me, the scribe (to borrow some Stoppard parlance).

Four, possibly less sophisticated, reasons for my personal appreciation of Stoppard include his masterful adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun for Spielberg’s film of the World War II–themed novel; his uncredited script work on the same director’s popcorn masterpiece Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (no doubt responsible for the clever interplay of fathers, sons, and Grail symbolism); my appearance in a secondary-school production of The Real Inspector Hound; and my continued love for his Oscar-winning screenplay Shakespeare in Love, co-written with Marc Norman.

The latter, in particular, has been a source of great inspiration for me, as it depicts Shakespeare as much a man living by his wits as by his wit. It makes this great genius relatable by characterising him in a way similar to a neurotic screenwriter in modern Hollywood, and just as fallible to the trials of a doomed love affair as Romeo and Juliet. Stoppard’s own wit is evident throughout, but so is his heart—two vital qualities for any great playwright, writer, or screenwriter.

I can only hope that I might one day write something a fraction as good as it.

In fact, I do have this idea about a pirate. ^^

Rest in peace, Tom Stoppard (3 July 1937 – 29 November 2025).