🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a