🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a