Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a