The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a