🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a