The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Energy of the Theatre

Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played 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 silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached 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 increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions 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 deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a