🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a