🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a