🔗 Share this article

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a