🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a