The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a