🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, 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 unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a