Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a