Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 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 addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a