🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a