🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in 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 got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a