Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Room

All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion 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 repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played 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, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a