Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a