🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a