🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor 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 resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a