Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a