The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up 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 ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a