Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a