Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a