🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection 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 performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a