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 art faces off against politics. (Art, no surprise, wins.)
Wordplay, aphorisms and bon mots were Stoppard’s signature. Not since “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a play that Stoppard revered the way a mathematician would regard the world’s most elegant proof, has the English stage experienced such high-flying chat. Yet he acquired a reputation as a dandy, a clever humorist and an intellectual showman, distinctly apolitical and seemingly a man of no convictions.
The latter charge he no doubt would have taken as a compliment. He prided himself on having a mind unstained by certainties. But he was aware of the criticism of his work as intellectually brilliant but emotionally brittle. Virtuosity, in language and dramatic structure, was his great strength. But also perhaps his weakness — a weakness for which many lesser writers would no doubt sell their souls.
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” and “Travesties were indeed master manipulations of plot and language. They were also breaths of fresh air that won Tony Awards for best play and established Stoppard as a transatlantic force. It would have been perfectly natural for him to continue in this vein, but his writing took a more personal turn in “The Real Thing,” a play about a playwright learning both to write about love and to take in and appreciate its complex reality.
New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called “The Real Thing” “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.” The 1984 Broadway premiere, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close under the direction of Mike Nichols, won Tony Awards for its leads, Nichols’ direction, Christine Baranski’s featured performance and best play. It was Stoppard’s third such honor, and it would not be his last.
But the criticism didn’t end there. (Is it any surprise that in “The Real Inspector Hound,” his 1968 one-act, Stoppard imagined a scenario in which a critic is killed by the play he’s reviewing?) Stoppard’s cleverness, while the source of his fame and prestige, was intimidating to some and off-putting to others. Not everyone goes to the theater to be wowed by verbal pyrotechnics or daredevil plot high jinks. The blinding brilliance of his plays left theatergoers still squinting to see whether his work had much of a heart.
Stoppard ranged freely over a variety of dramatic modes. (It was this ability that made him such a valuable screenwriter and script doctor, earning him not only wealth but also a shared Oscar for the screenplay “Shakespeare in Love.”) But he had no interest in writing character studies. Domestic drama, with its psychological epiphanies and sentimental resolutions, repelled him. But neither was he drawn to the issue-laden work of his more politically minded postwar British playwriting peers, that new breed of dramatist unleashed by John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.”
A born entertainer who had no ideology to sell or bourgeois morality to promote, he gravitated to theater as the most exhilarating form of debate. What he called “the felicitous expression of ideas” mattered more to him than academic point-scoring. Language was a theatrical resource that could do more than win arguments.
The comedy of ideas had become self-serious over time. Stoppard was determined to restore its fun without diminishing its substance.
His astonishing erudition encouraged him to tread where few playwrights before him had dared to go. But he was too much of a sensualist to cloister himself in the archives of the British Museum.
When I interviewed Stoppard at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater during rehearsals for his play “The Hard Problem,” he told me that he didn’t think he ever spent more than half an hour on research. He did concede, however, “I’ve spent many, many days of my life reading for pleasure in order to inform myself about something.
How else could he have pulled off “The Coast of Utopia,” a three-play creation centered on 19th century Russian intellectuals, romantics and revolutionaries against decades of geopolitical tumult? This marathon epic earned Stoppard his fourth Tony Award for best play.
“Arcadia,” perhaps his crowning achievement, may not be as sprawling but it’s just as intellectually ambitious. It’s also perhaps his most lyrically affecting.
A literary and biographical mystery play set in an English country estate in two different time zones (one in the age of Lord Byron, the other in the era of contemporary academic sleuths), “Arcadia” owes a debt to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession.” (In her mammoth biography “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee reports that “Byatt has said that Stoppard told her he ‘pinched’ the plot from her.”) But the way Stoppard incorporates mathematical concepts as rarefied as fractal geometry to explore concepts of order and chaos as the characters hypothesize on the patterns of time is Stoppardian through and through.
Stoppard’s late works are his most personal. “Rock ’N’ Roll,” which he dedicated to Vaclav Havel, explores the rebellious, Dionysian force of popular music, an eternal source of inspiration for him, in a play set partly in Prague during the Communist era. “Leopoldstadt,” which won Stoppard his fifth and last Tony for best play, is the work in which the playwright grapples, from an artistic remove, with the history he was late to discover about what happened to his Jewish family during and after the rise of Hitler.
“The Invention of Love” is one of those Stoppard plays that leaves a critic feeling both rapturous and unsatisfied, a paradoxical state but then what can anyone expect from a play that makes the poet, classicist and closet homosexual A.E. Housman a theatrical protagonist?
No play by Stoppard can be fully appreciated in a single theatrical outing. The dramaturgy is too complex, the intelligence too quick-footed and the language too dazzling for instant assessment. My fear is that the plays are too expansive for the diminished scale of dramatic production today. But Stoppard has left theatrical riches that will entice audiences for generations through their intellectual exuberance, preternatural eloquence and omnivorous delight.
When asked how much of the alien language used by the franchise’s central hunter species he is able to speak, “Predator: Badlands” director Dan Trachtenberg quickly answers, “Zero.”
“My mouth will not even permit me to utter [even] a phonic from it,” Trachtenberg says of the language created for his film, praising his actors for learning it. Linguist Britton Watkins “really developed the language as if it had evolved from the mouth shape and the throat sounds that we have heard before from the ‘Predator’ [movies], but it really fits the ecology of the Yautja species. And my throat won’t allow me to do it.”
“Predator: Badlands,” which opened to a franchise record $40 million at the domestic box office, is the first “Predator” installment where one of the alien hunters is the hero. The movie follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja outcast on a quest to prove his worth to his clan by hunting a massive, nearly unkillable beast on a deadly planet.
Thia (Elle Fanning) and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) meet on a deadly planet in “Predator: Badlands.”
(20th Century Studios)
During his hunt, Dek encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), an android that has been separated from the rest of her research party — as well as the lower half of her body — and is happy to provide helpful intel on the planet’s lethal flora and fauna.
For Trachtenberg, who rejuvenated the long-running sci-fi franchise with the 2022 prequel “Prey,” it was important that the Yautja and their culture feel “as authentic and archaeological” as the human ones he has featured in his “Predator” films, which also include this summer’s animated anthology “Predator: Killer of Killers.”
“I wanted to make sure that the Yautja species was treated seriously and with dignity,” the filmmaker says. “We’re asking people to empathize with a monster, with something that was the slasher in a slasher movie to some degree, decades ago.”
That meant consulting an expert to fully construct a language for the Yautja. Watkins was recommended to the “Predator: Badlands” team by Paul Frommer, the linguist who created the Na’vi language for the “Avatar” films. He was tasked with developing both the spoken and written Yautja language, first introduced in “Killer of Killers.”
Watkins understood that “Badlands” would involve both the type of action that audiences expect from a “Predator” film as well as more quiet moments where characters are just talking to each other. This meant creating a language that was as faithful as it could be to the trills and roars of previous “Predator” movies while also being “a tonal match and a kind of atmospheric match” to English for scenes when both languages are used in conversation.
“I started, rather than with a complete language and vocabulary and everything, a framework that I could build out as things changed with the production,” Watkins says, explaining that this involved creating both phonological and grammatical rules. “I built the framework for a language that was never going to have sounds that didn’t belong in it, but could expand in terms of vocabulary and grammar to suit whatever we needed over the long course of filming.”
He also knew that once Yautja was introduced, there would be fans eager to dissect and learn it just like there have been for other constructed languages created for sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV shows.
“I knew that … people would want to pause [the movie] and they’d want to rewind and they’d want to figure it out,” Watkins says. “So I wanted to keep it simple, but it’s not dumbed down. It’s culturally appropriate but it’s approachable as a language [for] people [that] want to learn it.”
Here are a few tips from Watkins for those interested in learning Yautja.
The alphabet includes complex consonant clusters
The Yautja alphabet can be seen in the writing on some of the objects in “Predator: Badlands.”
(20th Century Studios)
When designing the phonology of the Yautja language, Watkins took into account the aliens’ physiology.
“They don’t have lips, so they can’t make ma or ba or fa [sounds] because they don’t have the lips to do that,” Watkins explains. “To supplement not having F and V and Th and M, we have consonant clusters like jl and cht … that we don’t have in English, but they can be made lower in the throat.”
These consonant clusters comprise multiple letters when written out in the Roman alphabet, but are one letter in the Yautja alphabet. The Yautja word for prey, for example, starts with the letter hrr.
Their alphabet “is optimized for visual efficiency for their sound system,” Watkins says. Yautja writing can be seen on weapons and other objects in “Badlands.”
Basic sentence structure is the reverse of English
In Yautja, the structure of a declarative sentence — one that makes a statement, provides a fact or offers an explanation — is the reverse of those in English.
“The object or the predicate comes first, the verb is in the middle and then the subject comes at the end,” says Watkins. “Once you establish a rule like that, you have to keep it unless you have a legitimate reason to break it, like we do in English.”
Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in “Predator: Badlands.”
(20th Century Studios)
Listen for recurring words
Yautja words are largely analytical, meaning “there aren’t 14 versions of a single noun,” Watkins explains. This includes the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ which in Yautja is chish.
“When it’s ‘me’ earlier in the sentence, it’s chish [and] when it’s ‘I’ as a subject at the end of the sentence it’s still chish,” Watkins says. “It doesn’t change.”
Another sound to try to catch is nga. Ngai is the Yautja word for ‘no,’ so nga occurs in any word that has a negative element in it, like “nobody.”
You can tell how Yautja feel about you by what they call you
Unlike chish, the Yautja use different words when addressing or referring to others based on respect and affection.
“The words for ‘you’ and the words for ‘he’ or ‘she’ change depending on who’s speaking about whom,” Watkins explains. “It’s culturally appropriate for Yautja, in the Yautja culture, [to] talk about other people pejoratively.”
Think of it a bit like the difference between using tú or usted in Spanish. When addressing someone they look down on or are disrespecting, the Yautja use wul, while someone they respect would be addressed as dau. Kai is the word used when addressing a close friend.
Yautja isn’t a gendered language (for the most part)
Unlike languages such as French and Spanish, Yautja has no grammatical gender, so nouns aren’t assigned gender categories.
There is, however, a pronoun gender distinction for he and she, much like in English. Similarly, all Yautja use chish for “I” and “me” regardless of gender.
One of the reasons Yautja has no grammatical gender is because that was most practical.
“There was not a lot of time [to create Yautja], and adding gender like that is going to add complexity to the language,” Watkins says, explaining that this complexity would have made it more difficult to quickly turn around any adjustments to the script that needed to be made over the course of filming.
That it also helps keeps the language accessible for Yautja learners is a bonus.
An easyJet flight attendant has revealed the ‘secret language’ that cabin crew use to communicate with each other while on board a flight
12:00, 03 Nov 2025Updated 14:27, 03 Nov 2025
The flight attendant said it was a ‘secret language’ (stock image)
An easyJet flight attendant has spilled the beans on the covert language they use to communicate while onboard. An anonymous member of the budget airline’s cabin crew popped up on their Instagram feed to spill the secrets.
Interestingly, it is not a spoken language, but more akin to sign language, with various gestures signifying different things. She revealed: “While I’m here on my own I’ll let you into a little secret.
Content cannot be displayed without consent
“As cabin crew you may be aware but we do have a secret language on board, a way of communicating to each other when we want food items and with over 200 passengers on board the plane is very long so you may have noticed that if you would like a ham and cheese sandwich we do a croque monsieur, a chicken wrap, and a calzone pizza but don’t tell anyone I told you.”
Whilst mentioning the croque monsieur, she mimicked a crocodile with her hand. For the chicken wrap, she extended an arm out like a chicken wing before rolling her hands together to signify a wrap. Lastly, for the calzone, she placed the heel of her hands together before bringing her palms and fingers together, presumably to illustrate the folding together of a calzone.
People in the comments section were impressed, with one saying: “Absolutely iconic!”
“We were just talking about this after our flight last month,” said another, while one person said: “I saw a crew member do this to another crew member, I realised it was internal sign language!”
“I often watch the crew doing this trying to work out what they’re on about lol,” one person said. Another said: “Ha ha my Mrs worked a few out on our flight back to MAN from AGP last week.”
