🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual 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 indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a