🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a