Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Room

All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings 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 played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a