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The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Stage
Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.
Initial Encounter
I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck 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 premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.
Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth
From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”
The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.
Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation
Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose 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 most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.
Debating the Power of Theatre
Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 important but it says nothing about anything.”
I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a
Margaret Crane
A tech enthusiast and writer passionate about exploring the latest innovations and sharing practical lifestyle advice.
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