Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, 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 eventually came to understand 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting 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 leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a