🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran 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 creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful 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 currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised 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 realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open 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 clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a