Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a