🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a