🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called 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 operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a