🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised 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 causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a