🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity 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 impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a