The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a