Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a