🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a