🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a