Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back 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 apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a