The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a