Stoppard: An Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Room

All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual 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 grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a