🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up 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 visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a