🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, 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 collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack 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 increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries 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 behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a