🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a