Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a