🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a