The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a