🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a