🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a