Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called 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 driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity 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 leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a