🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a