Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a