🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a