🔗 Share this article

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a