🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries 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 endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a