The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a