The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre
All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Early Discovery
Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.
Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance
From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”
The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed 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 broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.
With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.
Debating the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a
