Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Room

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a