🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a