Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a