🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, 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 dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile 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 increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a