Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Stage

All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London 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 years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a