🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a