Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Theatre
Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.
Initial Introduction
I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.
Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance
From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed 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 hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.
With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.
Debating the Efficacy of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”
I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a
