The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides 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 then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, 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 belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached 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 key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a