Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Room

All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up 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 breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a