Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born British playwright whose dazzling wordplay and philosophical acrobatics made him one of the theater’s most celebrated voices, died on Nov. 29 in England. He was 88.
While Stoppard will be remembered for masterworks like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Arcadia,” it should be recalled that he was one of the most eloquent defenders of Soviet political prisoners and dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.
That transformation began in 1977, when Stoppard traveled to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with Amnesty International. What he witnessed – the systematic persecution of writers, the abuse of psychiatry to silence dissent, and the courage of those who refused to be silenced – had a profound influence on him.
The plays that followed represented a new Stoppard – one who wielded his formidable theatrical gifts in service of those who deserved to be defended.
“Every Good Boy Deserves Favor,” which premiered in 1977 with a full orchestra conducted by André Previn, told the story of a Soviet dissident imprisoned in a mental institution alongside a genuinely mad patient who believes he conducts an invisible orchestra.
“Professional Foul” was a television play about a Cambridge philosopher who travels to Prague for a conference and becomes reluctantly involved in smuggling a dissident’s thesis to the West. “Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth” (1979) paid direct tribute to Vaclav Havel and Czech dissidents, who performed in living rooms under police surveillance. “Squaring the Circle” (1984) tackled the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Though he became quintessentially English, Stoppard also belongs among the great Czech intellectuals of his generation, alongside Václav Havel and Milan Kundera.
Stoppard’s human rights work extended far beyond the stage. He became a tireless advocate for Amnesty International, Index on Censorship, and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse, all of which I was connected with at that time. When others might have been content to write a check, Stoppard showed up.
I had the good fortune to meet Tom Stoppard in the second half of the 1970s, when I was a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science and subsequently began working for Amnesty International’s Soviet Union unit and writing for Index on Censorship.
I recall his inspirational participation in our private meetings to plan our activities led by my tutor at the LSE, Peter Reddaway, the actor David Markham, and psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Low-Beer. I was the youngest participant. Wine and cheese – the taste of goodwill, solidarity, and freedom.
In the summer of 1976, I had the honor of speaking alongside him and others in Trafalgar Square to our supporters about prisoners of conscience most Britons had never heard of. From Ukraine, they included Leonid Plyushch, Semyon Gluzman, Mykola Plakhotniuk, and others.
At that moment, the Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was the focus of our demonstration. I’ve managed to reproduce a photo of the event obtained from a still in a documentary film made that year.
Although it is somewhat blurred, it is worth reproducing because of the insight it provides into what we were up to in those days, when it would have been so easy to write off Eastern Europe and the numerous peoples suppressed by Moscow’s despotic rule.
I am sitting on the far right in a blue shirt. To my right are the psychiatrist Dr. Low-Beer, former Russian political prisoner Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Reddaway, Markham, who is at the microphone; behind him a brown shirt, former victim of Soviet psychiatric abuse, Viktor Fainberg, and to his right, looking down, Tom Stoppard.
And the placards speak for themselves: Free Bukovsky, Free Crimean Tatar Leader Mustafa Dzemilev, End KGB Terror in Ukraine, Release Soviet Jewish Prisoners.
The following year, after his release, I joined Bukovsky, Plyushch (who was also released earlier that year), Stoppard, and others at the same famous site, calling for the release of other Soviet political prisoners. In fact, our Committee in Defense of Bukovsky, headed by Markham, was reconstituted as the Committee to Defend Viacheslav Chornovil, a leading imprisoned Ukrainian dissident.
Stoppard understood what it meant to live under tyranny and what it cost to resist.
For those of us in the human rights campaign, having someone of Stoppard’s stature made people pay attention.
He was a gentleman, handsome, more like a rock star than a writer, highly articulate without sounding arrogant or condescending, usually soft-spoken, and despite his fame, open and receptive.
He understood that political theater fails when it preaches, succeeds when it illuminates complexity. His dissidents were not saints but human beings – flawed, frightened, and funny.
In later years, after the Soviet Union collapsed and new threats to freedom emerged, Stoppard remained a voice for the victims of despotism, a defender of writers under threat.
He became a strong supporter of the Belarusian democratic movement. After the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he made it clear that he had no illusions about the expansionist nature of Russian rulers from the tsars to Vladimir Putin.
Though he became quintessentially English, Stoppard also belongs among the great Czech intellectuals of his generation, alongside Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. Like them, he understood what it meant to live under tyranny and what it cost to resist. He used his talent and his platform for the exact cause they did – freedom.
I am proud to have known Stoppard, even if only briefly, during my young, formative years in London, when, thanks to his influence, we had no illusions about who was who or who to support.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.