Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a