The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Always Heightened the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech 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 constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a