The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a