Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Theatre

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed 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 victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly 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 provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a