🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a