Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a