The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a