🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. 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 dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a