Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Always Heightened the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 suffering 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a