🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a