🔗 Share this article

All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk 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 unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a