The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a