🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver 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 is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a