Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries 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 behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a