🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a