The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly 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 Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a