🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a