Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Raised the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a