🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a