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

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a