🔗 Share this article

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a