🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a