Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims 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, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a