Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Always Raised the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, 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 belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile 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 apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a