🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a