🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a