🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting 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 end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a