🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a