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

All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes 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 overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a