The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Theatre
All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.
Initial Discovery
I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance
From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”
The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.
With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a