🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, 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 unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a