The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre
Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
Early Introduction
I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with 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 is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand 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 commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”
The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.
Questioning the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”
I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
