🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness 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 dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a