Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much 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 now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a