🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a