🔗 Share this article

All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a