Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a