🔗 Share this article

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a