🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a