🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always 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 praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a