The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Stage

All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. 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 incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a