The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage
All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.
Early Discovery
I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth
From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”
The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.
Debating the Power of Art
Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a
