🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a