🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a