Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got 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 dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a