The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a