🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up 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 got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a