🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually 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 cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a