Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a