🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken 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 Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a