🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a