Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a