Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor 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 silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a