Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating 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 resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a