Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was 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 Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a