Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a