🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely 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 Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a