Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes 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 currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a