Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a