🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a