Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Energy of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into 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 replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a