Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. 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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a