The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Energy of the Room

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much 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 was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a