Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Energy of the Stage

All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a