🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a