Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up 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 ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a