🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a