🔗 Share this article

All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – 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, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a