🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction 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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact 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 depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a