The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a