Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Energy of the Room

All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion 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 big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a