Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling 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 viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a