Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Room
All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Initial Encounter
I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.
It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.
Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”
The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing 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.
Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.
With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.
Debating the Efficacy of Art
Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
