Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a