The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came 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 ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a