🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a