🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a