Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual 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 random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a