The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a