Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Always Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a