The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Energy of the Stage
Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.
Initial Introduction
Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.
It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.
Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth
From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”
The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Meticulous 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 complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.
Debating the Efficacy of Art
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
