Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage

All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a