🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up 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 breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a