🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual 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 storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness 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 end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a