🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech 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 pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a