Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling 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 multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a