Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. 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 pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a