🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a