Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Stage

All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. 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 dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity 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 causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a