Tom Stoppard, the renowned playwright, has died. The funny thing is that I never saw any of his plays performed. And yet he played a critical role in making me who I am.
The fact that I knew this playwright by reading his plays, rather than seeing them on stage, may be something Stoppard himself might have appreciated. It is somewhat akin to appreciating music by just reading the score, without ever listening to the orchestra. (Except, of course, in one of his plays there is an orchestra; an orchestra that it exists only in a madman’s mind, though the audience can hear it too…). And of course, I just read that play as well, never saw it performed.
The news of Tom Stoppard’s passing took me back to my teenage years in 1980’s Delhi. Of course, pre-internet. So there was a scarcity of information, of books, of ideas, of access. And yet, I was a voracious reader, hungry to learn.
Once a month I made the journey to the British Council Library or the American Center—two bus changes, crowded DTC buses, a full day there and back. I had multiple library accounts, a small necessary deception, so I could leave with twenty books instead of four.
At the British Council I discovered R.L. Gregory and the science of perception: how the eye lies to the brain, how the brain lies to us. At the American Center I found Scientific American and Martin Gardner’s mathematical games, which led me to Douglas Hofstadter, who played with dialogue and paradox and self-reference, (and ambigrams) until my mind bent in ways it never unbent. At the British Council I picked up a paperback called The Selfish Gene by someone named Dawkins and Ever Since Darwin by Gould. The first deeply influenced my thinking, and the latter made me aspire to be a better writer. (In fact, there is a homage to both Gould and Darwin, in the last paragraph of the 2006 Mishra and Koehler paper that introduced the TPACK framework).
I became obsessed with optical illusions and others tricks our minds play. With Escher’s impossible staircases and hands drawing hands. With Magritte’s pipe that was not a pipe. With Duchamp’s urinal, his middle finger raised at tradition and meaning making. I was reading about quantum mechanics and relativity, about how observation changes what is observed, about how light is a wave and also a particle. I was reading the history of modern art—surrealism and Dada, movements built on the suspicion that reality was not what it presented itself to be.
This was the ecosystem. This was the water I was swimming in.
And somewhere in that water, I found Tom Stoppard.
But it wasn’t his most famous play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, that impressed me. In fact, it sort of left me cold. (As I have often remarked: Shakespeare and pretzels are overrated.) What clicked were his smaller plays, the experiments—and boy were they fun.
Hapgood was a spy thriller that uses quantum physics as both plot and metaphor. Twins. Double agents. The uncertainty principle. You cannot know both where a particle is and where it’s going. You cannot know both who a person is and what they will do. It was a Magritte play brought to life. The play has a physicist who explains wave-particle duality while the plot enacts it. I had never encountered anything like it—this fun mix of art and science and play.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was a play for actors and full orchestra. A Soviet psychiatric hospital. A political dissident and a genuine madman sharing a cell. The madman plays the triangle. He believes he conducts an orchestra that only he can hear. Except we hear it too, a real orchestra, on stage, playing. Hallucination made visible. Audible. The title is a mnemonic musical notes. The play is about what happens when the state gets to define sanity.
And finally, Artist Descending a Staircase, was a radio play with a palindromic structure. It begins in the present, moves backward through time scene by scene to a central pivot, then moves forward again. A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A. The same events, recontextualized. What you understood one way, you now understand another. Stoppard exploiting the medium of radio to create something that could exist in no other form. A tape recording played backward. A mystery that solves itself by folding. Some of my games with palindromic poetry seek to capture the same magic.
Years later, I watched Stoppard receive an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. I watched the movie too. I didn’t care much for it. The intellectual hijinks that had so enamored me were absent—or perhaps just smoothed over for a wider audience. And there he was at the ceremony, saying something like “thank you for inviting me to your party,” looking vaguely bemused, like a man who had wandered into the wrong room. What I remember is the gap between the Stoppard of my teenage imagination and this man accepting a golden statue for a romantic comedy.
And then the news of his death. And there I was, suddenly back in New Delhi, a teenager on a DTC bus clutching a cloth bag heavy with library books. Gregory on perception. Gardner on paradox. Hofstadter on strange loops. Dawkins on genes that use bodies as vehicles. Stoppard on spies who are also wave functions.
And somehow those plays that I never saw performed—experienced only as text, as idea, as structure—became part of how I see. Physics as drama. Structure as meaning. Perception as the unreliable narrator of reality. And underlying it all was this sense of play. Play as in theater but also play as in playful. Many years later I would read Johan Huizinga and his book Homo Ludens —the idea that what makes us human is that we play. And that idea would resonate, deeply. It is no coincidence that my research group is called The Deep Play Group.
And that willingness to play with form and structure, the enjoyment of the double-take when what we think we see is not what it truly is, has stayed. I make ambigrams now, words that read as other words when you flip them. I design optical illusions. For 17 years our family made new year’s videos that were typographical optical illusions, playing with time and the medium. I am drawn, over and over, to the places where perception folds back on itself, where certainty dissolves, where the act of looking changes what is seen.
Stoppard taught me that form could think. That a palindromic structure wasn’t a gimmick but an argument. That you could put quantum physics in a spy thriller. That an orchestra playing on stage could be both real and imaginary, and that this contradiction was the whole subject.
He taught me to play with ideas. Not just to have them, but to play with them—to flip them, to see what they looked like upside down, to treat intellectual life as a kind of seriously fun game.
And to be honest, I hadn’t thought about him much in recent years. But getting the news of his passing made me realize that there are influences that have shaped me deeply but have receded into the architecture of who I am—invisible maybe because they are foundational.
I wrote something similar earlier this year, when Bill Atkinson died. He created HyperCard—that strange, beautiful tool that let ordinary people build interactive things on computers, that prefigured the web, that treated users as creators. I never met him either. But, as I wrote, HyperCard shaped how I think about making things, about software, and design, and the design of software.
Two people, I never met. Who never even knew of my existence. But two people who made me who I am.
Note: My friend Leigh Wolf read this post and shared this clip from the print version of The Times (UK). Clearly Stoppard’s influence went far beyond just a teenager in New Delhi in the 1980’s.
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