The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Theatre
All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
Initial Discovery
I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary 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 word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”
The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.
Debating the Power of Art
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
