🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a