🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a