🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named 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 mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister 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 complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile 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 ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a