🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- 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 open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a