🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a