🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, 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 astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a