🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped 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 concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a