All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.
Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.
From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a
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