🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a