Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a