Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.
I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.
It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.
From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”
The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.
Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.
Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.
Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. 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 wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a
Rashid Al-Mansoori is a tech journalist with over a decade of experience covering innovations and digital transformations in the Middle East.
