🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a