🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome 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 relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a