🔗 Share this article

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a