🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a