Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a