Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous 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 theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a