🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came 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 more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a