Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Room

All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence 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 relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 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 totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a