🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed 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 casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a