Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage
All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Early Introduction
I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.
It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.
Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth
From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”
The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.
Debating the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”
I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a
