🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 impressed by the creativity 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 opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. 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 Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound 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 evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a