The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came 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 ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a