🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to 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 moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a