🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab 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 emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a