🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response 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 talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound 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 increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a