🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction 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 written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a