Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Energy of the Stage
All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.
Early Discovery
Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.
It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance
From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”
The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation
Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.
Debating the Power of Art
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”
I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a
