🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended 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 prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a