The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Raised the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate 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 quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a