🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a