🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor 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 stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a