All the best dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer (“a punk journalist from Bristol” was how someone described him to me) called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating escalating taxi fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.
It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy, first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.
From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me: “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”
The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss 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 outlasts her tragically truncated life.
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a relaxed, witty defiance”. Robert Cushman put it better when he later wrote in the Observer that “Mr Stoppard’s gaiety is a moral quality in itself”.
But the idea of Stoppard as a detached, apolitical observer of life was decisively punctured by several works that followed. Professional Foul, shown on BBC2 in 1977, was a beautifully wrought piece showing a Cambridge professor of ethics, played by Peter Barkworth, confronting the real world of persecution in the course of a visit to Prague and recognising that there is such a thing as an instinctive morality based on right and wrong. That play was one of several that were to show Stoppard engaging directly with political issues, acknowledging his national origins (he used to joke that he was simply “a bounced Czech”) and, something he kept hidden in accordance with his mother’s wishes while she was alive, the fact that he was Jewish.
The later, more political works varied in quality. The Coast of Utopia (2002) was a hugely ambitious trilogy about revolution that came most alive when dealing with characters Stoppard intellectually disowned: especially the rootless anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. Rock’n’Roll (2006) was a tighter, better play that suggested that, while the Czechs had fought strenuously for their freedoms, we were gradually allowing ours to slip from our grasp. Stoppard’s final play, Leopoldstadt (2020), was a deeply personal work that dealt, very movingly, with the history of a Viennese Jewish family, which ended with one of its members revealing that he was brought up as an assimilated English boy but acknowledging his true identity.
This was Stoppard’s final act of self-revelation. Born in Czechoslovakia, evacuated to Singapore and India during the second world war and finally settling in England in 1946, he had willingly embraced the customs of the country. He loved everything about it, from its countryside and its cricket to its supposed liberal tolerance. If circumstances forced him to recognise his national and racial inheritance, it was of great benefit to his later work and found rich fulfilment in Leopoldstadt.
So where does Stoppard stand in the hierarchy of modern British drama? Harold Pinter made poetry out of demotic speech and exposed the subjectivity of memory. Alan Ayckbourn has explored the traumas of middle-class life and exploited the theatrical possibilities of time and space. Tom Stoppard proved that scientific, moral and philosophical ideas could be a source of drama as long as there was a core of genuine emotion. But, while as a dramatist he always raised the temperature of the room, it is no less important to say that he was a kindly, decent and thoughtful human being. My last glimpse of him was just before curtain-up on the second night of a revival of Rock’n’Roll at Hampstead theatre. Stoppard was making his way home, but before he did so, he stopped to have a friendly conversation with the front-of-house staff and to lovingly stroke a dog belonging to one of them. Having made his fond farewells, he exited quietly into the night.
