🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally 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 cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a