🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a