🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed 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 fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached 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 ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a