🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 most of his plays to restaging. 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 national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a