🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a