Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much 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 now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a