Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Energy of the Stage
Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.
Early Encounter
Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.
It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.
Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance
From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember 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 stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”
The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough
Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.
Debating the Efficacy of Art
Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”
I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a
