🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising 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 emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms 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 completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a