🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember 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 beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a