🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped 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 individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a