🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable 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 gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a