🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a