Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed 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 recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a