Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a