Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Temperature of the Room

All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely 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 deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity 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 courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised 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 prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, 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 adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a