🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The 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 outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a