🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent 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 grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a