Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Energy of the Stage

All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a