The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Theatre
Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.
Initial Discovery
Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.
Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”
The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.
Debating the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a
