🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a