The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance 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 critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering 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 evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a