🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. 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 came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a