🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack 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 more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a