Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Energy of the Stage

All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a