🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue 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 heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a