The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Energy of the Theatre
Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.
Early Encounter
Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.
It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.
Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”
The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”
I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a
