🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack 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 arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a