Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet 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 dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a