The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Atmosphere of the Theatre
Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.
Early Introduction
I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.
Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth
From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”
The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding 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 ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a
