🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a