🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a