🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. 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 language 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 sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research 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 thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a