🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a