🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed 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 disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a