🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind 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 addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a