Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a