Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise 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 praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely 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 ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a