Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a