🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling 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 seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a