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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time 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 repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a