writer

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 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.

LEGENDARY The Simpsons writer Dan McGrath has died at the age of 61, his family announced.

The award-winning comedy writer, who also worked on Saturday Night Live, died following a stroke, his sister said.

Gail Garabadian wrote on Facebook: “We lost my incredible brother Danny yesterday. He was a special man, one of a kind.

“An incredible son, brother, uncle and friend. Our hearts are broken.”

She told Hollywood Reporter that he passed away at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn.

Dan kicked off his career at SNL, when he often collaborated with Adam Sandler.

He then had two stints as a writer for The Simpsons, followed by eight years on King of the Hill.

He went on to win an Emmy for writing the iconic 1997 Simpsons episode Homer’s Phobia.

The episode sees Homer befriending an antiques dealer, and later discovering he is gay.

It was also honoured by GLAAD – which promotes fairness in media – for its anti-homophobia message.

Dan is survived by his wife Caroline, his mother, Eleanor and siblings as well as nieces and nephews.

The writer cut his teeth on Harvard University’s student comedy publication, The Harvard Lampoon.

He landed a job for Saturday Night Live in 1991, and stayed there for two seasons.

During that time, he shared an Emmy nomination.

He began working on The Simpsons in 1992, and wrote 50 episodes across two years.

Dan later received producing credits on 24 episodes from 1996-98.

His most memorable episodes include The Devil and Homer Simpson, Time and Punishment, Bart of Darkness, instalments of the Treehouse of Horror series, Boy-Scoutz ’n the Hood and Homer’s Phobia.

Dan said that both his runs with the show ended with him being fired.

This is a breaking news story, more to follow…

Eric Preven, one of L.A. County’s most prominent citizen watchdogs, has died at 63, according to his family.

Preven, a well-known government transparency advocate, garnered a reputation as an eagle-eyed observer of local meetings, a savvy wielder of the state’s public records act, and a reliable thorn in the sides of his government.

Relatives said Preven died Saturday in his Studio City home of a suspected heart attack.

The term “gadfly” often is bandied about local government to describe those who never miss a public meeting. But politicians and his family say the term doesn’t quite do Preven justice.

“You may not agree with him, but it wasn’t just like [he was] shooting from the hip. He would do his research,” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who watched Preven testify for more than a decade. “He would let the facts speak for themselves.”

In 2016, Preven and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California took a lawsuit all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, finding the public had a right to know how much the county was paying outside lawyers in closed cases. Three years later he successfully forced the city to expand its rules around public testimony after he argued he’d been unlawfully barred from weighing in on a Studio City development.

Many attendees of local public meetings tend to drift into offensive diatribes that have little to do with the matter at hand. Preven never did.

Instead he fine-tuned the art of presenting minute-long, logical arguments on everything from budget shortfalls to seemingly excessive settlements. He could be cutting but he always had a point to make.

And he never missed a meeting.

“Thank you for this exhausting dressing down of the probation department,” Preven said last Tuesday after the supervisors wrapped up rebuking officials for paltry programming inside juvenile halls. “The idea that we’re paying for these programs, these programs are scheduled, and nothing is happening is terrible.”

A New York native, Preven moved to Los Angeles to work in Hollywood, landing TV writing gigs on shows including “Popular” and “Reba.” His path into local activism began 15 years ago after his mother’s two chocolate labs were removed by the county’s animal control department following a fight with an off-leash dog, according to his family.

Preven, a canine lover known to throw parties with members of his local dog park, found the removal of the labs unjustifiable. He went to the Board of Supervisors meeting to tell them so. Then he went again. And again. And again.

Long after the dogs were returned, Preven kept going back.

“He started listening to the meeting and looking at the agenda, and he became just appalled at so many things that he saw,” said his brother, Joshua Preven. “He became so incensed by it.”

Preven became a fierce advocate for the public’s right to know what was happening in local meetings and kept close track of staff changes at City Hall. He was known to text local government reporters early on weekend mornings to ask why someone had stepped down from a city agency, or self-deprecatingly share his latest blog post on CityWatch, a local news site.

“My latest deep dive into my own navel,” he texted two weeks ago with his new article on the famed architect behind his historic home in Studio City’s foothills.

He often sent Times editors and reporters weekly emails on successes and shortcomings in their coverage. The county’s politicians and officials received similar messages about their governance.

“He could be irascible,” his brother said. “When he came and encountered the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, it became a really good use of that stubbornness.”

Preven was a dogged user of the California Public Records Act, finding gems of records buried in seldom-scrutinized agencies. He filed so many record requests to the Animal Care and Control department that the county assigned an attorney just to deal with them, according to Dawyn Harrison, the county’s top lawyer.

“Eric was the epitome of an engaged constituent and critic of local government, persistently questioning and challenging government officials,” Harrison said. “As his interest in County government grew, so did the range of his requests; so, my office decentralized the handling of his requests because no one person could cover all the subjects he looked into. He was a true watchdog.”

Supervisor Janice Hahn said Preven had been scrutinizing her and her colleagues ever since she was a councilmember at City Hall.

“Eric Preven never let those with power in government forget who we work for. … He pushed us, he challenged us, and he had an opinion on everything — from the biggest issue of the day to the more routine contract votes that too often go overlooked,” she said. “While some people wrote him off, I thought there was always truth in what he had to say.”

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes parts of Studio City, said he “took seriously the role of citizen, religiously participating in County meetings.”

In addition to his brother, Preven is survived by his sister, Anne Preven, his mother, Ruth Preven, his father, David Preven, and two children, 28-year-old Isaac Rooks Preven and 26-year-old Reva Jay Preven.

Preven ran several times for public office, launching idiosyncratic campaigns for mayor, city council and county supervisor. He barely fundraised and wasn’t allowed in many of the debates, said his brother, who helped out as his campaign manager.

“We didn’t know what the hell we were doing at all,” Joshua Preven said. “But he kept showing up.”

Times reporters Dakota Smith and David Zahniser contributed to this report.

While the New Year is a peak time for booking summer holidays, especially for families looking to jet away outside of term time, here’s why I tend to be an early bird booker in November

The promise of a summer holiday is often the thing that gets you through the post-Christmas slump. And holiday companies certainly know this. While you’re finishing your turkey sandwich and fighting festive hangovers, there are two adverts you’ll see a lot of; sofa sales and holidays.

As a travel journalist, I take a lot of last-minute breaks, but as a busy mum when it comes to booking my own holidays, I like to be organised. This means that before I’ve put the tree up I’ve often got my summer holiday booked, and November can be an excellent time to start browsing travel sites.

Here are some of the reasons why I’m already thinking about my summer holidays this month and will likely be booking in the next couple of weeks.

1. Yes, there are some great deals

While travel companies do offer sales in January and February, November is a quiet month for bookings for travel companies, which means there are often flash sales and deals going on that aren’t as heavily promoted, but can still save you a lot of money.

Of course, the big one in November is Black Friday. At the time of writing, many of the major operators were still keeping their deals under wraps, although Jet2 currently have 20% off flights and £100 per person off all holidays.

Black Friday is officially on November 28, but in my experience, most travel companies will launch their offerings before then. If there’s a particular tour operator, airline, or cruise provider you’re interested in, sign up for their newsletter now. Some of them will give early access to deals, and you can always unsubscribe later.

2. Availability is better

Most airlines and accommodation providers will have released their 2026 summer availability by now for early bird bookers. If you’re looking for a very specific destination or holiday type, for example a certain cabin type on a cruise or a sea view apartment in your favourite resort, then you’ve got a better chance of nabbing it now before the New Year rush.

As someone who once endured an overnight ferry to France in a reclining seat because I booked too late and there were no cabins left, I always try to get bookings locked in as soon as I know the dates I want. Car hire is another one that tends to be better booked in advance, especially if you’re visiting a small Spanish or Greek island, as they’ll often have limited vehicles available.

3. It’s easier to budget

As a parent whose family holiday dates are restricted to half terms and those dreaded six weeks of summer, I’m well aware how expensive it can be to even get a few nights in a caravan during peak times. That’s why I like to take advantage of interest-free options for spreading the cost, so I can budget monthly and get the holiday paid off before I go.

TUI, for example, offer zero deposit options, with the cost of the holiday paid in instalments via direct debit. The last payment is made eight weeks before your holiday, so if you book earlier, you can spread it in smaller instalments which I find much less painful than paying in one go.

Some UK holiday providers offer the same such Haven offer low deposits of £30 and a variety of payment options to help you budget.

Always make sure you can afford the monthly payments, as missing one could mean your holiday ends up getting cancelled with any payments lost. Read any terms and conditions carefully. Make sure there’s no interest being added and avoid options like credit cards and pay later providers who can add massive fees.

4. You can lock down popular annual leave dates

If you’ve ever worked in a team with other parents, you’ll know there can be a battle to get weeks off at certain times of year. Even if you aren’t booking your holiday yet, it’s worth getting those annual leave requests in. Of course, never book a holiday before you’ve had your annual leave approved.

5. Enjoy the holiday excitement for longer

Christmas can be a stressful time, so it’s nice to have something to look forward to. I appreciate it’s not the same for everyone, but I really love the countdown to my big holiday. It gives me plenty of time to look for local attractions I want to visit, and even start shopping for holiday clothes.

Admittedly, early booking isn’t for everyone, some people love to be spontaneous. But if you’re already dreaming of jetting off in summer it may be a good time to see what the tour operators have to offer.

Have a story you want to share? Email us at [email protected].