Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a