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

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a