Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Atmosphere of the Room

All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals 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 speech being written 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 broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a