🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually 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 crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a