Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse 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 showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a