The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Atmosphere of the Room

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The 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 private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a