🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a