🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual 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 individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose 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 breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a