Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction 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 Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire 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 strictness with a