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

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a