The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a