🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. 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 now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture 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 audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a