🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses 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 independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a