Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed 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 perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a