🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally 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 constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a