🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a