🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a