🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result 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 relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a