The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization 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 host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a