Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a