🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV 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 forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate 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 quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up 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 private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a