Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re 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 had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a