🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a