🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound 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 key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 social 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a