🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a