The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a