Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a