🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides 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 obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a