🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a