Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.
I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.
From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”
The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.
With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a
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