🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up 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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly 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 cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a