🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a