🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy 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 reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly 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 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a