The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Energy of the Stage
All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.
Early Discovery
Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from 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 then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance
From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven 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 finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”
The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a