🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a