The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. 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 pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a