🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared 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 fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably 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 civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a