The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Theatre
Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.
Early Encounter
I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.
Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.
Questioning the Power of Art
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”
I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a
