Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a