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

Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came 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 increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a