🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up 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 ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power 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 the Vietnam War 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a