🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack 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 visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a