Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Stage

All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a