The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Atmosphere of the Stage
Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.
Initial Encounter
I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.
It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.
Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.
Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”
I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
