Appreciation: Tom Stoppard reinvigorated the comedy of ideas

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Tom Stoppard, dead?Surely, someone has made a hash of the plot.Yes, he was 88, but the Czech-born, British playwright, the true 20th century heir to Oscar Wilde, would never have arranged things so banally.“A severe blow to Logic” is how a character describes the death of a philosophy professor in Stoppard’s 1972 play “Jumpers.” But then, as this polymath wag continues, “The truth to us philosophers, Mr.

Crouch, is always an interim judgment … Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?”Few people were more agnostically alive than Stoppard, who loved the finer things in life and handsomely earned them with his inexhaustible wit.A man of consummate urbanity who lived like a country squire, he was a sportsman (cricket was his game) and a connoisseur of ideas, which he treated with a cricketer’s agility and vigor.Stoppard announced himself with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” an absurdist lark that views “Hamlet” from the keyhole perspective of two courtiers jockeying for position in the new regime.

The influence of Samuel Beckett was unmistakable in the combination of music hall zaniness and existential ruthlessness that characterized the succession of early plays that merged the Theatre of the Absurd with a souped-up version of Shavian farce.Simple wasn’t Stoppard‘s style.

The Fellini-esque profusion of “Jumpers” includes warring philosophy professors, a retired chanteuse and a chorus of acrobats, set within the frame of murder mystery that owes a debt to the gimlet-eyed social satire of Joe Orton.“Travesties,” Stoppard’s 1974 play, is built on the coincidence that James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin all happened to be in Zurich during World War I — a cultural happenstance that paved the way for a dizzying alternative history, in which...