Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating 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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more 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 multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a