The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Theatre
Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.
Early Discovery
I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth
From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”
The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright 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, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.
With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The 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 social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.
Questioning the Efficacy of Art
Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a
