🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling 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 today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a