🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a