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

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a