The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus 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 anguish of a fractured 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.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into 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 answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a