Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling 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 today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a