🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding 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 addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a