Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a