🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a