🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a