🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a