The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached 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 more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a