The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage

All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as 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 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 youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a