The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a