Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity 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 currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a