🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a