The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Energy of the Room

All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called 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 driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a