🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a