🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast 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 narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly 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 provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a