🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping 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 Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a