🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to 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 word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a