Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room
Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
Early Introduction
I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity 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 critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth
From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”
The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.
Questioning the Power of Art
Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a
