🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound 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 increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions 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 beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a