🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a