Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated 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 dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a