The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a