(Bohdan Nahaylo’s article appeared in The Kyiv post, 12/1/2025. Photo: Tom Stoppard speaking at a public meeting in defense of Soviet political prisoners in Trafalgar Square, summer of 1976. Still from Vladimir Bukovsky, documentary film, 1977. )
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.
