🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a