🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a