The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Energy of the Room
Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Initial Discovery
Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance
From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a
