🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

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 British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a