Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement 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 heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a