🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a