🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast 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 consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly 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 Vietnam or social 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a