🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance 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 chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The 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 social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a