Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Room

All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library 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 years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a