🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to 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 then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening 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 abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a