Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a