Absent Friends

Helen Shaw, at the New Yorker, on “Tom Stoppard’s Radical Invitation”:

When Tom Stoppard died, on November 29th, at the age of eighty-eight, he left behind a theatre changed by his blistering intellect and blazing success, the heat and light that made the rest of our English-language garden grow. You might say that Shakespeare has his points, or that Samuel Beckett had his day. But Stoppard’s enviable gifts—“his looks, his talents, his money and his luck,” as the playwright and memoirist Simon Gray said—made him our current theatre’s primary influence, even in such vivid company.

By any measure, Stoppard’s achievements are astounding. He is the only playwright to win five Tony Awards for Best Play: for “Leopoldstadt,” in 2023; for the three parts of “The Coast of Utopia,” in 2007; for “The Real Thing,” in 1984; for “Travesties,” in 1976; and for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” in 1968. (That he didn’t win in 1995 for “Arcadia,” one of the greatest plays ever written, is delightfully appropriate for a work about how every age misunderstands its genius.)…

For a generation or two, he also worked for Hollywood, sometimes writing screenplays—“Empire of the Sun” (1987), “The Russia House” (1990), the Oscar-winning “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), which he co-wrote with Marc Norman—sometimes writing polishes or uncredited passes, most famously on “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). In interviews and profiles, the signs of his material prosperity further burnished his legend, perhaps because he lived like a lord with a study “any writer would sell his agent for,” as Mel Gussow wrote in a 1984 Times feature. There was a fugitive thrill in seeing a playwright, of all people, get rich and famous.

What’s less measurable is the extent to which Stoppard altered the culture. Glamour has its gravity, of course. When Stoppard stepped away from a nascent journalism career into the limelight in the nineteen-sixties, he became a rock-and-roll poet-prince, a Romantic hero in striped trousers and a mop of curls that got only more Byronic as he aged. His air of louche mischief attended his farces about Dada and James Joyce and moral determinism, his cleverness worn as lightly as a scarf. Stoppard was the rare man-of-the-theatre known to the world outside the stage door: he was knighted in 1997; he was Mick Jagger’s favorite playwright and spiritual double, as well as what the playwright David Hare called a “conservative with a small ‘c,’ ” both in his literary tastes and courtly country-squire persona. (He swaggered like a dandy but dropped Latin declensions like an old boy; that’s how you become beloved by both your rock gods and your Queen.)…

‘He played with language better than anybody’: Terry Gilliam and John Boorman on Tom Stoppard

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) December 5, 2025 at 3:33 AM

And this may be the *best* discussion of Stoppard’s pop-culture influence, even though it was published in 2016. Mike Fitzgerald, at Creative Screenwriting — “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Learning from Tom Stoppard”:

… Last Crusade was written by Jeffrey Boam, from a story by George Lucas and Menno Meyjes. So say the opening credits. Boam’s final draft, dated March 1, 1988 (ten weeks before production) differs drastically from the published script which reflects the released version of the film. Differences come as no shock, but with Last Crusade they aren’t just a few deleted scenes and some line changes. Whole sections of the Boam draft were reimagined, major set pieces were added, and the pacing and tone were markedly transformed. Whoever made these changes possessed a profound grasp of story craft.

So who was that? Spielberg himself made certain revisions, such as expanding the desert tank sequence from a few pages to over eleven – injecting some much-needed action into the story. Some scenes were filmed but omitted during the edit, like an extended chase through the Zeppelin in which Indy and Henry are pursued by a Gestapo agent and a World War One flying ace.

And then there was the uncredited script polish by Barry Watson – you know, the Barry Watson? Never heard of him? Perhaps if we peek under his pseudonym… ah, yes: Sir Tom Stoppard, a four-time Tony winner who later bagged an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. Since we can’t know whose pen revised which pages (although Spielberg did say that “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.” Let’s just call it a collaboration of some titans of storytelling.

Escalation
As the story progresses, stakes grow. Obstacles get harder. Time runs out. Last Crusade’s first act follows Indy searching for his father. Boam’s draft kicks this off with an early proof of danger: still in America, Indy (Harrison Ford) and Brody (Denholm Elliott) find a murdered housekeeper in Henry’s backyard. They now know this is life-or-death.

Yet, once in Venice, they adopt a breezy mood and Indy flirts with Elsa (Alison Doody). You’d think he’d mobilize the police to find his dad, but there he is, drinking wine and taking his time. Stoppard’s revised draft loses the corpse and delays Indy’s first encounter with danger until after he’s found the knight’s tomb.

This bestows an escalation: at first it’s a mystery, then it’s a life-or-death struggle.

Escalation can also improve scenes and beats. In the castle, when the SS officer demands that Indy fork over the grail diary, Boam’s draft has Henry incredulously ask Indy if he brought it with him. In Stoppard’s version, Henry’s initial reaction is to laugh, before asking, “Do you think that my son would be that stupid?” His face then falls as he realizes the answer is yes. The beat thus gains a small arc, in which Henry’s mood escalates from sass to disbelief to fury…

Obstacles
The hero’s victory has to feel earned, and ideally the main obstacles should reflect the hero’s inner struggle. Let’s take act three. In Boam’s draft there is a single grail challenge, the decapitating blades. The solution spelled out in the diary is to dodge them by walking three paces forward. It’s a generic key and presents no test for Indy.

The revised script triples the obstacles and ties them into a major theme of the franchise: Indy’s faith. First his knowledge of religion is tested: “The penitent man will pass” means to kneel (duck) and “the word of God” is Jehovah (er, Iehovah). Both of these force Indy to decipher a riddle under pressure. Finally comes the leap of faith, the most intimate test. The three challenges also escalate the Indy-Henry arc: by relying on the diary clues, Indy is proving his faith in his father…

Fun
This franchise owes much its success not to derring-do stunts or operatic drama but to the sense of fun along the way — the humor. To be sure, some great gags are present in the Boam draft, but Stoppard majorly beefs this up.

Recognizing that the prime humor lies in the father-son interaction, he chops 25 pages out of act one so that Henry enters the story on page 53, instead of page 76. After all, time spent with Connery’s accent is time well spent.

“Roadside” jokes that are narratively irrelevant are cut, and instead the banter between Indy and Henry is built out. Memorable gags are added, such as the librarian’s noisy book stamp, Henry checking his watch during the dogfight, the Sultan preferring the Rolls-Royce to golden treasure, and the Henry-Brody tank interchange. “Named after the dog” is shifted from the end of act two to the denouement — saving the best joke for last…