The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a