Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC 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 racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a