🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a