The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab 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 had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to 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 touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a