🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended 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 casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a