Stoppard: An Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms 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 entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a