The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Stage
Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.
Early Encounter
I had the good fortune to discover 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 BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”
The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.
Debating the Power of Art
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”
I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a
