Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Theatre

All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a