Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms 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 insane and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a