The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a