The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a