🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, 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 followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position 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 presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a