The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “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 touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex 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 holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly 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 provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a