🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time 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 creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played 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 quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a