Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a