The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Energy of the Stage
Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.
Initial Encounter
I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”
The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library 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 time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.
Debating the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”
I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a
