Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night 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 one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile 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 visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a