Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage
All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
Initial Discovery
Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The 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 knew the nature of the journalistic world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance
From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”
The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.
Questioning the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”
I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a
