🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a