🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous 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 complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a