🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a