🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed 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 Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a