🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a