🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a