The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a