The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties 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, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big 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 talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a