Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. 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 beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a