🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a