Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Theatre
All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Early Encounter
I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.
Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.
Debating the Power of Art
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a
