Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Raised the Atmosphere of the Room

Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a