🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion 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 obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a