🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion 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 repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a