Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Room

All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a