🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a