The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a