🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in 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 young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a